New user issues I’m sure, but I cannot draw a line even though only silk screen layer is activated and others are turned off. I must select active layer (which I thought was already selected on the layer menu…) in order to draw the line. When finished with that line, if I want to draw another line, I cannot draw until I use the menu to select active layer again. Why doesn’t active layer remain on until changed?
Also, every time I ‘mouse down’ on the PCB, that annoying block operation popup happens.Is there a way to disable that? It interrupts what I am doing. I cannot seem to select a graphic that I have drawn.
Is there a ‘measure’ tool (ruler)? Kind of hard to check distances between items without it and having that darn block operation popup happen…
No, there is no true “measure” tool in KiCAD. The work-around is described above by @HiGreg :
Place the mouse cursor over the reference point where you want to measure from. Zoom in if necessary, and eyeball the location as best you can, because there isn’t any “snap to object” behavior, either.
WITHOUT MOVING THE MOUSE, hit the {SPACE} bar. This resets the Relative Coordinate system. You should see the values for “dx”, “dy” and “dist” (on the right side of the bottom display bar) go to “0.000000”.
Move the mouse cursor to the target point you want a measurement to. The “dx”, “dy” and “dist(ance)” values represent the Cartesian lengths from the reference point.
The original post sounded like one of those new-user questions that drags on for most of a week, as additional factors about the specific situation come to light. I tried to present the most relevant information within the framework of the original poster’s questions.
(Yeah, it probably would have been a good idea to present some of this using screen captures, annotated with “Paint”, but I didn’t feel that ambitious last night.)
