Wishlist: Gerbview to show unknown file names as layer names

[Evan Shultz]

When Gerbview cannot read the function of a Gerber file from the metadata in the file, the layer name will be an asterisk. See the attached image and header file from Cadence Allegro. Gerbview does not indicate what is contained in the layer for this file. (Most Gerbers coming from Pcbnew are recognized since Gerbview knows where in the Gerber header to find the layer function.)

While it's unreasonable to support the myriad of Gerber header formats for each PCB design tool, unrecognized files could use the file name as the Gerbview layer name. This would at least allow the user to understand what data is in each Gerbview layer.

Note that since some people use the file name to indicate the layer and others use the extension, Gerbview would have to somehow concatenate those two pieces of information for unknown files to give the layer names some intelligence. For example, concatenate with "_" to make top.gbr into "top_gbr" and pcb.l01 into "pcb_l01".

Application: gerbview
Version: 4.0.3-stable release build
wxWidgets: Version 3.0.2 (debug,wchar_t,compiler with C++ ABI 1009,GCC 5.2.0,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Boost version: 1.57.0
         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

[Evan Shultz (evan-shultz)]

Here's the header section of a Gerber from Allegro.

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

Current Gerbview version (coming to Kicad V5, or available in daily builds) shows now the filename.

FYI, the allegro "header" is just a list of comments (G04 is a comment line), very useful for human readers, but has no info for Gerber viewers.

I flag your wish as fixed, because it is really fixed in development tree.