Wish : Add the possibility to hide the page frame and title block in GerbView

[Laurent Haas]

If the gerber elements are near the (10, 10) mm coordinates the default page layout disturbs viewing. Changing page size does't make any difference as the top left part of the (red) frame is still near these coordinates.

Wish :

- Option to hide totally the page frame and title block (btw, if it could exist on the other programs of the suite as well, it would be appreciated)

OR

- Allow other page layout description files (which could be blank)

Application: gerbview
Version: (5.0.0-rc3-dev), release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.3
    libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.0.2l zlib/1.2.11 libssh2/1.8.0 nghttp2/1.23.1 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1), 32 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.3 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
    Boost: 1.60.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.8.0
    Curl: 7.54.1
    Compiler: GCC 7.1.0 with C++ ABI 1011

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

When plotting your Gerbers, uncheck the "Plot sheet reference on all layers" checkbox.

(I'm leaving this as a bug so we can improve the checkbox name in 5.1.)

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

Jeff, I think this might be about GerbView not having the ability to select which Page Layout file it uses, no?

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

@Seth, to my mind Gerbers are rendered artefacts, not source artefacts. Page Layouts belong in source artefacts.

Thus, you can choose what Page Layout to use in PcbNew, and also whether or not to render said Page Layout to your Gerbers.

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

In Gerbview, you already can hide the page frame, in page settings option.

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

@jp, if in GAL, the red worksheet page border thing is not hidden, but it works in GAL.

An other minor inconsistency is that the grey page limit is not shown in OpenGL (Accelerated) but shown in Cairo (Fallback), but it does not seem like it matches the worksheet page border in red much.

[Laurent Haas (efcis)]

@Jeff I confirm the "Plot sheet reference on all layers" was not checked when plotting

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

@Jeff, I agree with gerbers being rendered artifacts. In GerbView, however, we can select the page onto which they are rendered. Right now, the "Page Borders" dialog in GerbView allows a few different ISO-style sizes (and, as Nick mentions, the option "Full size without page limits" doesn't work in GAL). It doesn't allow us to select the page layout file we use.

These are useful, even in GerbView, as they give us a defined scale against which we can measure our printout. They also allow us to brand/version the output when printing from GerbView. Having the ability to turn them off makes sense. But we shouldn't just get rid of them all together.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

Interesting. I did indeed have mine set to "Full size without limits", where you don't get any border "overlays".

So there are two things at play: artefacts rendered /to/ the gerbers (controlled by the Plot dialog), and "overlays" we draw /over/ the gerbers.

I think the easiest way to clear up the confusion is to:

  (1) rename the Plot setting to "Plot frame and title block"

  (2) break out the GerbView preference into "Show page limits"
      and "Show frame and title block"

  (3) fix the GAL issue with page limits (I already did this for
      PcbNew, but evidently not for GerbView).

We can then leave:

  (4) allow specifying a page layout file

as a separate wishlist item.

[Laurent Haas (efcis)]

@Jeff

FYI, in pcbnew, there is checkbox named "Worksheet" in the Items tab to (supposedly) enable or not the frame and title block. Unfortunately, it also drives the visibility of the page limits (which should be driven by another checkbox IMHO). Maybe you could make things consistent with this kind of UI in Gerbview ?

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

New proposal based on @Laurent's comments and some investigation.

1) rename the Plot setting to "Plot frame and title block"

2) add a GerbView preference for "Show page limits"
   (to be consistent with PcbNew)

3) add a GerbView render items for "Worksheet"
   (to be consistent with PcbNew)

4) fix PcbNew & GerbView so that show-page-limits is not dependent on
   worksheet being set

These changes will also make the GerbView page sizes independent of the show-page-limits and worksheet settings.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

I'm going to punt on (4) for now. No one has complained about it, and perhaps folks even like that page limits are only drawn when the worksheet is drawn.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

Fixed in revision a747d074c42fef7fb13781481338159c08654867
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=a747d074c42fef7fb13781481338159c08654867