Comment 16 for bug 594023

I was very puzzled that hatched ground fills are not available, as they seem like a very basic feature. Capacitive touch panels are becoming more and more prevalent and I consider this to be a basic feature.

What support do you guys need to get this to work? I am a programmer and could potentially assist on this, but KiCad is a large project and I would not know exactly where to start. Could someone point me towards the current source code for ground fills?

Anyone have any other ideas how this could be implemented? My workaround was to take my ground plane, export a gerber file, use Adobe Illustrator to vectorize the gerber file, convert the solid plane to a hatch plane, use bitmap2component to import a 1200dpi png, use the online web .mod resizer to resize it back down to 300dpi so the lines were not all munged up, and then had to manually edit the text files to get everything on the correct layer, and create a footprint for it.

The biggest issue with something like this is that importing a 1200dpi (which is necessary to get bitmap2component to render the lines properly) is that the resulting .kicad_mod file has WAY more vectors than necessary, and when I import the file into pcbnew it gets all kinds of bogged down.

This is not a viable workaround for any ground fills that are larger than 5"x5" as PCBNEW freezes for seconds at a time whenever the footprint is moved.

Does anyone have any idea when this might be implemented in the roadmap? I am willing to assist in making this happen, Wayne, any ideas?