Turning off "footprints" rendering also hides all silk

[Paul "LeoNerd" Evans]

Turning off the render option for "Footprints front" hides all of the F.SilkS objects, even those not associated with footprints.

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When I get near the end of my board layout, I like to spend some time fine-tuning all the silkscreening - any informative text about IO pins, iconography, that sort of thing. I find it easier to do that with as many of the layers turned off as possible, so mouse clicks usually don't collide with other objects.

One thing I can't currently do (bzr -r6909) is turn off "Footprints front", because if I do that then every piece of silkscreen on F.SilkS hides - even those freeform texts and shapes that I've drawn that aren't part of footprints. So instead I have to leave that layer on, meaning often when I click on an item of silkscreen, I get the disambiguation menu pop up because that silkscreen was close enough to a footprint that KiCad thought maybe I meant that instead.

It would be great if standalone silkscreen remained visible when I turn off "Footprints"

[Novak Tamas (novak-7)]

Turning off Footprints front hides all F.Silks and F.CrtYd linex/texts not associated to footprints
in

Application: kicad
Version: (2016-06-15 BZR 6936, Git 3f2b157)-product, release build
Libraries: wxWidgets 3.0.2
           libcurl/7.46.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2d zlib/1.2.8 libidn/1.32 libssh2/1.6.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
- Build Info -
wxWidgets: 3.0.2 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.57.0
Curl: 7.46.0
KiCad - Compiler: GCC 5.2.0 with C++ ABI 1009
        Settings: USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
                  USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
                  KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
                  KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
                  KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
                  USE_FP_LIB_TABLE=HARD_CODED_ON
                  BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON

[Jon Evans (craftyjon)]

This is caused by the GAL panel linking together layers to the footprint front/back layers, for example:

m_view->SetRequired( F_SilkS, LAYER_MOD_FR );

It's not an easy fix because if you remove this link, then toggling the footprint checkbox won't change any of the silkscreen visibility. Any change that allows turning off the footprints (including their silkscreen) while leaving silkscreen that is not related to footprints alone will break the layer caching implemented in GAL.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

@Jon, could we perhaps use a similar strategy here as I did for this one:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1553459

[Andrzej Wolski (awolski)]

This bug was fixed in commit:
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/commit/?id=4c19606eb7aece70eb0b601ae0d0b52b4a98948d

[Nicholas Savenlid (nicholas-z)]

wonderful

thank you

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

@Andrzej, thanks for the update. I wonder if the LOD stuff is a better way to solve my issue too....

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

Indeed, the LOD strategy did make for a much cleaner implementation of my last bug fix.

https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/commit/?id=d9d9a54aa8253c690343547373ffff98f2bd933b