Turn off silkscreen for a footprint on a board?

[James_Fowkes]

Is it possible to disable the silkscreen for a footprint in PCBnew?

Just as it’s possible to hide the reference silkscreen for a component, I would like to be able to hide the “graphical” silkscreen (lines, circles, arcs etc) for specific footprints, for a variety of reasons, mostly aesthetics. Sometimes all the extra bits of silk from closely spaced components can make a board layout look quite messy.

I could create new “no-silk” footprints as I need them, but this seems tedious.

To avoid confusion, I’m not talking about doing anything to footprints in the footprint editor, this is for specific instances of footprints on a specific board.

[jos]

In Pcbnew hit E on a selected footprint. There you can change e.g. layers, visibility.

[James_Fowkes]

Not in my version of PCBnew at least, is that a recent feature?

Mine looks like this:

With KiCAD version 5.0.0, release build, Linux 64-bit.

[jos]

That’s why.
Consider upgrading to 5.1.4. Then you are in.

[eelik]

I’m not sure jos is talking about the thing you want. It’s not possible to turn layers on/off for a footprint. In 5.1 it’s possible to turn on/off visibility of each text item of a footprint. But if you want that for component outlines or other non-text markings, it’s not possible.

Many users like to hide references and/or values of all footprints in Layers Manager->Items while doing the layout. But that may not help you, either.

[James_Fowkes]

Yeah I often hide stuff from the view, I was looking for a way that actually changed the board design.

Maybe I’ll try doing it through directly editing the PCB file, or have a dig into the KiCAD source, see how hard it would be to add.

[qu1ck]

If you edit footprint that is placed on the board the changes will only persist in that board and not in library (unless you explicitly save to library as well). So you can just ctrl-e that footprint and remove unnecessary graphical items.
Just make sure to lock it afterward and not update footprints from lib or your changes will be lost.

[Piotr]

@James_Fowkes

I would like to be able to hide the “graphical” silkscreen

May be it will help.
We had footprints in which pin 1 marking was done by line in silkscreen going through that pin. As some PCB manufacturers didn’t mask that lines with pads we decided to order PCBs without silkscreen. It was more then 20 yeras ago, but as it worked we just don’t have silk at our PCBs till now. In rare situations when PCB is visible to the user and I need to write some descriptions (signals to be connected to terminal blocks) I do it at one on mechanical layers and send it to PCB manufacturer with info that it is silkscreen.

[James_Fowkes]

Ah, I’ve been aware of that editing feature but have never thought to explore it.

This seems like the best option given that I’m only looking at a reasonably small handful of footprints. A bit more “manual” than I was hoping, but never mind.

Thanks very much!

[James_Fowkes]

This is actually a pretty nice hack round the problem and I might consider it in the future!