I’m wanting confirmation from people of a bug in 5.99.
Schematic editor:
Edit / Edit text and graphic properties
Tick “wires and wire labels”
Change “line style” to “Dotted”
Zoom schematic in and out. As sheet gets smaller on monitor dotted wires suddenly disappear.
Other line styles work as expected.
Not all the developers read this forum much and by properly registering a bug, it gets tracked.
Top of the main KiCad window
Help - Report Bug
This goes to the GitLab sign in page
Can’t confirm.
I assume by “scroll schematic in and out” you mean Zoom in/Zoom out using mouse wheel.
In my case, at some zoom level the dotted lines change to solid lines and stay visible.
Application: KiCad (64-bit)
Version: (5.99.0-12650-g5c402a64ab), release build
I posted here looking for member confirmation before reporting a bug. Didn’t want to waste developers time.
Yes zoom. I edited original post.
Thankyou.
I suspect the behavior will likely depend on what your antialiasing settings are so add that to the report.
Can not confirm. Your problem is not on this machine (Mac, KiCad Version: (5.99.0-12741-g2662433374)
I also can not confirm this.
(Edit: I can confirm this, see my next post).
When setting the wires to dotted there is a zoom level that the dots are very small and not very well visible, but when I zoom out further they appear as solid lines.
I tried this with and without anti-aliasing and with different line widths.
There also used to be a “canvas” setting in KiCad. Something with “Legacy” and “Modern”, but I do not see this anymore in KiCad-nightly V5.99. On linux, the “legacy” canvas was already removed a long time ago. Is there still a setting for this on some operating systems?
Application: KiCad Schematic Editor
Version: 5.99.0-unknown-ef74421922~134~ubuntu20.04.1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 5.4.0-88-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, xfce, x11
Build Info:
Date: Oct 2 2021 07:45:57
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.71.0
OCC: 7.5.2
Curl: 7.68.0
ngspice: 31
Compiler: GCC 9.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013
Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON
Problem solved.
Preferences / Schematic editor / Display options / Rendering engine / Accelerated graphics.
Programme came installed with “Fallback graphics”. Needed changing to “Accelerated graphics”.
I found it a bit strange that only the “dot” line version was affected. All the other line versions worked correctly.
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Application: KiCad Schematic Editor
Version: 5.99.0-unknown-4d6b1a4e36~140~ubuntu20.04.1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 5.4.0-88-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, cinnamon, x11
Build Info:
Date: Oct 8 2021 18:19:47
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.71.0
OCC: 7.5.2
Curl: 7.68.0
ngspice: 31
Compiler: GCC 9.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013
Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON
You just beat me to it.
I just discovered that the “accelerated” and “Fallback” graphics have moved from the main menu to the preferences, and with the "Fallback Graphics** settings dashed lines become very thin and dotted lines disappear when zooming out.
So I can now confirm this bug.
You consider this a bug?
Only just beat you… say 1 minute. 
Almost any visual difference between accelerated and fallback, at least when the difference is “functional”, is a bug. They don’t look exactly identical, but they should show the same information content.
Thankyou, will report.
Adding a few screenshots clarifies the problem:
This is the look of dotted nets with “Accelerated graphics”
This is the same area, but with “Fallback Graphics”:
wasn’t their talk of removing fallback all together?
Correct, Paul. It only occurs with dotted lines. I checked all the other types.
Have reported.
Have you checked the other issue?
You touched on the issue with:
Dunno.
Must be just talk because it is there and it is busted.
No. Maybe in the future (v7?) KiCad will change to another graphics library alltogether which handles the backround hw/sw automatically. At the moment fallback exists for machines which don’t have hardware/drivers for OpenGL, but it has been coded separately and therefore needs extra mainenance.
It’s hard to remove it when the chip makers cannot be bothered sometimes to write working OpenGL drivers
The current thinking is to move to a backend that supports other stuff (DirectX, Vulkan, etc) in addition to OpenGL and use whichever graphics library works best on a given platform by default. At some point we may stop supporting non-accelerated graphics (i.e. remove the Cairo option) but that hasn’t been determined yet.
