Drawing silk for elements on the "far side"

[Chad Parker]

I haven't had time to dig into this yet, but it seems as though if you have a element, and you put it on the far side, the silk can be turned on and off by either turning off the "far side" layer, or the "top silk" layer. This doesn't seem right to me.

Could be an issue with my test, but, I don't have time to track it right now, and I don't want to forget about it.

[Bert Timmerman (bert-timmerman)]

Hi Charles,

I took some free cycles and a design of a double sided layout with SMT parts on both sides, fired up pcb-4.1.2 and started hitting buttons.

I got the following behaviour (V = visible, NV = not visible):

I start with viewing top:

1) top silk layer = on, far side = off: top silk V, bottom silk NV, top layer V, bottom layer V, top pads V, bottom pads NV.

2) top silk layer = on, far side = on: top silk V, bottom silk V, top layer V, bottom layer V, top pads V, bottom pads V.

3) top silk layer = off, far side = off: top silk NV, bottom silk NV, top layer V, bottom layer V, top pads V, bottom pads NV.

4) top silk layer = off, far side = on: top silk NV, bottom silk NV, top layer V, bottom layer V, top pads V, bottom pads V.

Now I press [tab] and [v], viewing bottom:

5) bottom silk layer = on, far side = off: top silk NV, bottom silk V, top layer V, bottom layer V, top pads NV, bottom pads V.

6) bottom silk layer = on, far side = on: top silk V, bottom silk V, top layer V, bottom layer V, top pads V, bottom pads V.

7) bottom silk layer = off, far side = off: top silk NV, bottom silk NV, top layer V, bottom layer V, top pads NV, bottom pads V.

8) bottom silk layer = off, far side = on: top silk NV, bottom silk NV, top layer V, bottom layer V, top pads V, bottom pads V.

Now I could go on with another 8 permutations for toggling "pins/pads" on/and off, etc.

So here's my wrap-up:

- "far side" toggles visibility of silk and pads as expected.

- "far side" toggles the visibility of drill holes in pins (unexpected ? or unwanted ?).

- "far side" does *not* toggle top/bottom layers as expected.

- "top silk"/"bottom silk" toggles the visibility of silk as expected.

- "pads" toggles the visibility of the pads as expected.

There is a "bug", it's not in the silk ... it's in the top/bottom layers handling and probably in the handling of drill holes.

Now there is a note for solving this "bug": if for example we were in top view and the bottom layer is active and "far side" is off, and we hit [tab] then the active layer would be rendered "not visible".

When we hit the layer togle button of the active (and thus visible) layer and render it not visible the active layer switches one layer "down" (cyclic) for another visible layer to become active (when that layer was the only visible layer pcb doesn't change visibility).

Maybe another word for "far side" like "transparancy" would help ?

I hope this helps a bit.

Kind regards,

Bert Timmerman.