Olimex Support Forum

Others => KiCAD => Topic started by: olimex on March 17, 2015, 02:09:17 PM

Title: Bug in Print functionality
Post by: olimex on March 17, 2015, 02:09:17 PM
We start using KiCAD more intensively now and encounter first bugs :)
Today we have board with new component packages and want to do control print to check the component pads and here are the problems:

1. here is how top layer looks in KiCAD

(http://i.imgur.com/FWRxZ0D.png?1)

2. Here is how it looks in Print-preview - Perfect!

(http://i.imgur.com/ch3RjhW.png)

3. but when we print this is what we get:

(http://i.imgur.com/srnZqKI.png)

some pads are inverted, generally have nothing to do with the preview!

4. We do not give up easily and decide to plot to gerbers and print the gerbers, so this is what we see in gerbv, again perfect!:

(http://i.imgur.com/aTR7NMU.png)

5. then we make Print Preview, Gerbv allow you to select which layers you want to printpreviw and with arrows you can move between the selected, the problem is that if you select layer 4 and 5, the print preview will give you preview of layer 1 and 2! i.e. it starts from layer 1 up to number of layers you selected but not preview the layers you really want to see. this way if I want to print for instance layer 3 I can't print just this layer but have to print all 1-3 layers

also same bug with printing is here too, the printed image do not look like the image you see in kicard and in the preview


Tsvetan


these of course are small bugs
Title: Re: Bug in Print functionality
Post by: oldpenguin on March 17, 2015, 06:36:46 PM
Hello Tsvetan

I'm moving away from my very old CAD system (OrCAD !) and investing heavily on Kicad.
It is costing me a lot of time because I was much more productive with the old environment.
Anyway, I'm too having a hard time printing the designs, either in from eeschema or from pcbnew. Sometimes print preview shows images correctly but the printed pages are blank or contain very few elements.
There are a few topics on the net about this.
The only way I managed to print from eeschema is to use the File -> Plot menu.
pcbnew is more problematic. I used the export to SVG and then opened with LibreOffice, but I couldn't manage to print at 1:1 scale. I only tested this with 2 layers so I can't tell what happens with more layers.
The gerber outputs seem good.

I hope you succeed using Kicad because I strongly believe this the future of software.

Best regards and thank you for your good work.

António
Title: Re: Bug in Print functionality
Post by: olimex on March 17, 2015, 07:46:14 PM
Hi Antonio

there is no turning back :) the guys from KiCAD returned me mail that this is well known bug but hard to fix, so they will work on this but I guess printing is low priority for them, although for me this is very important feature as now we have long route to generate gerbers and use CAM post processor to print the generated gerbers

this eats lot of time, but for the moment is work around which works

Tsvetan
Title: Re: Bug in Print functionality
Post by: olimex on March 27, 2015, 09:36:50 AM
the print functionality is fixed in Build #5536

Well done KiCAD team!