I recently started with KiCAD coming from other EDA softwares. I like it pretty well (after being pretty deterred by KiCAD 5), however the first moment of ‘WTH?’ arose in me when I saw two things in the PCB Editor:
Why is there an undeletable A4 Sheet visible in the PCB Editor ???
Why is there no ruler ???
While I found a way to disable the sheet frame, I am still a bit stunned that KiCAD doesn’t have such a ruler, not even as an option. Sure I use relative metering a lot. Especially copy/Paste with reference, aswell as typing absolute explicit coordinates, but I still feel more comfortable with the Ruler visible because I am so used to it from all other softwares.
just out of interest: which pcb-cad-tools have rulers? Until now I have seen it only at mechanical cad tools (qcad, autocad) and graphic programs (corel draw, inkscape, adobe).
All my previously used pcb-tools didn’t have a ruler:
eagle (v3.0 to v7.7, no experience with the autocad eagle versions)
designspark pcb (versions from around 2014…2016, only little used)
To be honest, i don’t understand what you miss about the ruler in KiCad, other than that it does not stay there when you move the mouse or do something else. But anyway, if you think it is so easy to implement and usefull, why do you not implement it and make a merge request?
KiCad is a open source project and useful contributions are generally welcome.
EasyEDA has rulers by default, which is what I used most. Altium Designer I am not sure actually. But I can’t remember that I was missing rulers in Altium Designer, so it probably has them. But I was frustrated by many other things in Altium Designer, so these may have overshadowed the lack of rulers
I still can’t understand what such rulers are helpful for. I mean rulers like @paulvdh show as example.
I care about positions when driving PCB edge and when placing some mechanical dependent components. But I need precision position information and not as small triangle shows me at the ruler so I don’t see them being very useful at this stage.
Later positions (in numerical sense) becomes for me don’t care for rest of design process. So for that rest (much much more time) the rulers would be really waste of pixels making your working space smaller.
This is an attitude here I see.
Any request “it’ useless. We give this, and or use this or buy something else”. Great answers. Only the universe you see, without considering the other exists, and if they implement them in other tools, it means: it IS useful.
I think you do not distinguish between an undisputed attitude and an attempt to discuss arguments.
If it was just such attitude then I would say: “It is useless. POINT.”
If I am explaining (I think I have done that) why I don’t see it being useful for me that means that I expect counter-arguments. If you dream of having rulers you should be able to say how they are helpful or in other words - what goal is difficult to achieve without rulers.
The problem is that there are not just one coordinate system.
I guess the ruler would have to follow the one set relatively (with space) for it to have any real usability…? There’s also a coordinate system for the sheet, one for the pick and place and the internal/default with 0,0 up in the left corner.
You do not gain any information. You already have an accurate readout, and you can gauge relative distance with the grid.
I for one would disable it.
You should embrace relative coordinates and offsets. Such a powerful way to handle absolute and relative positions.
I understand that each user uses a program a little different way and it is simply very possible that you are doing something differently than I and that way you fell into needing something I don’t need.
For example I never go through the footprint assignment stage during PCB design and if someone will ask for some modification in that process (I never even tried it) than I would not understand his needs, but it would be good if he could explain what will be easier to do if the modifications he asked for will be in place.
The same is probably with rulers. May be I just not do what you are doing and because of it I don’t feel the need for rulers, but you should be able to say what your tasks are difficult to do without rulers.
Glad to hear that the main reason there is no ruler option is because nobody asked for it and also glad to hear that somebody has now asked. I find that I have no idea where the origin is and frequently end up having to decrease a vertical measurement value in order to move it upwards because I am somehow below the x axis instead of above it like I thought. Rulers make this clear without squinting at the cursor position coordinates under the work area. Wordprocessors, bitmap photo editors, general graphics programs all have rulers - usual visible by default but with a user option to hide them. They’re very helpful to me in providing general orientation and sense of size for what I’m working on and what the grid and measurement unit settings are without burrowing through various settings menus and submenus.
Hello,
The origin is wherever you place it. You will find it down near the bottom in “Place” and you can set your axes how you wish with Preferences / Preferences / Origins and Axes then just read X & Y at the bottom of the screen… works well as a digital ruler.
The Grid is always displayed at Left-Middle of screen, just under the icons and beside Zoom settings.
No need to burrow.
It would help if @tormyvancool, @JanCarr, @tobalt, @hmk and others that wish for rulers would add information to this feature request regarding use cases and what problem it solves. As of right now, it’s not clear in the Feature Request why the rulers are requested. Details on how it should function, as asked for by jmk, should also be stated in the request.
To increase the change of this feature ever being implemented, you should also upvote it by pressing the thumbs up button.
I reviewed a handful of programs I use that have rulers in them - only to realize that I never use the Rulers and don’t need them.
However, recognizing that others seem to want them, I started hacking the code and, while it’s not clean/simple (it’s a real PITA for me to do this in Python) I made a snippet of
‘What-If-Progress’ by using code ideas based on other programs.
Yuk, Yuk, Yuk!!! I’m not a great Python programmer (I hate Python) and I’m Not going to spend another moment on this. I can easily imagine the work going well beyond a reasonable amount of time/effort to ensure they scale with the Window-Zooming… setting units, divisions, graphic scaling… Did I mention the word, Yuk?
And, why bother when I see folks here complaining about tiny ridges in blown-up graphics!
(re some other post…)
