I know that there was a topic about draw order (which is now locked), but I wanted to raise this feature request again. I didn’t buy the arguments that KiCad is not a program for drawing art, or that the ordering makes the drawing to inefficient.
An example of where it would be good to control draw order is a connector that I copied to modify. I took a 60-pin, single row connector to produce an 80-pin single row connector. To make it more manageable, I split it into two (with typical drafting wiggly lines to indicate cuts). I moved pins 41-60 over to the second half of the connector before adding pins 61-80. However, the little rectangles on the by the pins that were on top of the connector body on the original connector, and on the first half of the modified connector, are hidden by the body on the second half. It doesn’t matter if I draw the body or the pin rectangles first, they are always hidden.
A second case is a switch. I would like a line coming in for the common connection on the switch and a line for the switching element going out at an angle (< 45 deg), with a circle where the lines intersect. It is very hard to make the lines both come towards the center of the circle without crossing it, especially if you use a thicker line for the switching element. If you could draw both lines to the center of the circle, and fill the circle white, it looks much neater.
I have been doing that with the free package PCB Artist for a couple of decades. Its main drawback is that its files can be read by only Advanced Circuits, which is why I switched to KiCad.
The issue is if you can bring it into Kicad, not that Kicad can’t do it. Is your word processor and spreadsheet the same software? Nope, but it can be integrated. Not everybody needs the ‘art’ so why bloat the software for everyone?
Post a screenshot. Did you fill body with colour rather than fill body with background colour? Also there’s probably an issue for z-order at GitLab you can thumbs up.
Consider giving it a thumbs up on Gitlab (no comments needed) if this would improve your experience. While popularity is not a guarantee of fix/implementation, it definitely doesn’t hurt.
It can be interesting to open Kicad to check functions commented on in this forum. This thread led me to to a bug in 9.0.0-rc3. I was checking “Fill with:” to see if it worked as “Fill with background colour” only to find “Fill with:” doesn’t work at all in Kicad 9.
So, thanks, @jawala for the prompt.
I agree with both the retired feline and scone regarding your problems.
Hi Hermit, I apologize that my comment was perhaps too cryptic since I was referring to a comment in the locked post without including a link to it. I did not mean to suggest that any kind of artwork should be possible, just that it should be possible to make high-quality schematics. I don’t think that my requested enhancement counts as bloat, as I have seen it implemented in another package that is very efficient and performant.
I guess I was probably the only one to misunderstand. It comes up from time to time that people think Kicad should pretty much do something other programs already do well.
