I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.
There used to be in older versions a way to view all the footprints available in the default libraries. It was either a generated PDF, or something created specifically for that.
I can’t seem to find this in the new version, the versions I worked on were back in 2012-13.
I hope this still exists, but searches only seemed to point to the older versions, I haven’t found any information on the new versions.
Thanks, this is essentially what I’m looking for. So I guess that feature no longer exists in the new versions, since someone had to create a python script for this? This used to be part of the default installs.
I am not aware that there was ever a tool to generate a pdf of all available footprints.
However, the question you link to had other requirements which are still fulfilled. For example, the footprint browser can be used to quickly navigate libraries and see a preview of how the footprints look like just as the person asked over there. And at least in nightly the footprint editor can be navigated with arrow keys plus enter to show the selected footprint (so one more key press but still no mouse required)
Plus every tool for assigning footprints to symbols has a preview for footprint selection as shown in How can i assign a footprint to a symbol?. And well the general workflow starts from the schematic so this is actually how most users will search for footprints.
The add footprint tool if pcbnew has a preview at least in current nightly (i seem to remember this was also the case in version 5). This would again fulfill the requirements of the person whose question you linked to.
I guess this happens if one links to a 10 year old question. Most of the info including the original premise is hopelessly outdated.
Well that was the best reference I could find. Perhaps it didn’t generate the PDF, and it was already pre-created, but there definitely was a PDF with all (or most) of the default footprints. The footprint browser is nice and all, but it’s hard to get a visual scale in comparison to another component with a similar footprint. When I last saw this feature was probably in 2015, when I was designing something, just haven’t done anything since then, and it doesn’t seem to be there any longer. In any case I guess it isn’t available any longer, I will try the script.