Comment 14 for bug 1636549

Non-interactive generation of PDF output is indeed a very useful feature.

However, adding this specific functionality to the GUI and to the program code takes KiCad in a direction I would prefer not to see.

The reason is that this kind of functionality does not scale well with the possible use cases, and may generate the GUI and code base unmanageable.

Consider for example automatic generation of the following when a schematic is saved:
- Perform electrical rule check
- Automatic BOM generation, possibly with different BOM exportes
- Automatic netlist generation to user selectable format.
- Plot to any of Postscript, SVG, DXF, HPGL, in either Color or "Black and white", etc.

The example above are all useful features and likely use cases.

Therefore, the scripting solution as suggested by Wayne and xzcvczx is the preferrable.

One could imagine a user defined a Python script ("hook") which executes every time the schematic is saved. That hook could use the Python API to generate the PDF, PS, BOM, etc. One could also imagine a pre-save hook which brings up a warning (or prevents saving) if electrical rule check failed before save. The point is that this method is much more flexible and fully decoupled from the eeschema program logic.

Thank you