I had a question. It would be neat, if KiCad would be able to poop out schematic PDF with clickable links. I think I mean the same as in this unanswered threat of many moons ago
For instance. For this schematic, I would like a PDF in which I can click on the schematic sheets in order to navigate to the corresponding page. And every sub sheet should have some kind of BACK button to jump back to the parent sheet.
And like in the question. I also would like in a PDF to be able to jump throuh connections of things which are on the same net. Automatic zoom adjust perhaps…
Would this be a good feature request? Or is this already (partially) implemented?
I have found references in the manual. So I plotted a PDF, opened it in chrome and firefox. But no interaction.
Also, if this exists, why is there a feature request?
There is this line though. It does not say which PDF viewer does and does not work. I expected atleast chrome to work. So… do I need to add something in the schematic to get this to work?
I tried two PDF viewers on Linux, okular and evince. In both clicking on a symbol in the bookmarks sidebar brought up the appropriate page. My KiCad is still at v7. So, working as designed, I believe.
I am missing a button inside a sheet which is named: “Back” or something. I’d like that I can press a button inside a schematic sheet, which can take me back to the root sheet.
That gave me this brainfart: In schema editor you have dem arrow keys to navigate back. And it has even a hot key, alt + u. This ofcourse does not work in the PDF. There are ofcourse also bookmarks and hierarchial navigator.
What if we could add extra navigational elements inside the schematic itself. Just a piece of text that you can click on. You can specifiy to which page you want it to navigate. I can imagine that sometimes you want to jump from one subsheet to an other. These links should also work in the PDF to allow for even better navigation.
I am not sure if everybody would like their PDF to behave like KiCAD or that the developers would like to implement such a feature, however, Foxit has a navigation help that will send you to the “previous view”, in this case, if you click on a link the original page that send you there.
I prefer the scroll wheel to navigate the pdf, specially because mostly I have max 10 pages and it is quite fast.
If you don’t want such link buttons, don’t place them. They would be just a new graphical element which you can use or not.
@ our production plant. People use touchscreens nowadays, mainly to open eagle schematics. So I figured for that kind of usage it would help if you can navigate faster.
I share schematics / dump em on the internet regurely. But not yet as PDF. Having learned about these features I may want to add PDFs as well. And all my schematics are always spacious. I am a great user of hierarchial sheets.
Yea, basically the PDF standard is huge and web browsers refuse to implement a giant chunk of the interactivity features. Adobe PDF Reader and Foxit PDF are some of the few readers that fully implement the standard.
I do not believe we are going to violate “your schematics are exactly as you see them in kicad” to add such visual elements automatically. Conversely, this is a obscure feature of only PDF, so we aren’t going to add it to kicad as a placable element as its useless for everything else.
Perhaps I misunderstand. You already can place links in schematics. Just place textboxes and set the link to page numbers (#2, #3, etc). You could copy&paste like a clickable index to every page if you want to navigate through the pages. Works in KiCad and exported PDFs.
