I would like to be able to place a symbol on the schematic, associate a footprint with it and route traces to it, but not have the paste stencil create an opening for it, i.e. I’m wanting to specify a “no load” component, so that I can provision for a component to be hand-soldered at a later date (if needed) … and not have to first clean off the solder from the lands that were present because the stencil had an opening for the component that was, as least initially, not intended to be placed.
Is there a way to specify a “no load” that generates the aforementioned outcome?
In the end it is indeed the Front and Back Paste layers which define the holes in the solder stencil. At the moment there is no easy way to switch between different variants of the PCB. I can see a few ways to partially automate this.
Write a python script in the PCB editor to modify the mask layer (that script can have a list of footprints to modify).
Make two variants of a personal library for the PCB, then do a bit of file juggling to rename those libraries and then update the footprints on the PCB for a particular variant.
