Mail Archives: geda-user/2018/02/09/04:47:39
Hello,
Recently, I submitted a bug report about PCB messing up metric and
imperial step sizes when increasing/decreasing grid size, line size
etcetera after start-up. (And pcb-rnd does this wrong even after
selecting all metric sizes and steps).
However, there's one other thing with grid steps in particular that I
wondered about: the actual step sizes.
Isn't it far more logical to adopt the logarithm-based step scheme that
is ubiquitous wherever scaling takes place, so 1 - 2 - 5 - 10 - 20 - 50
etcetera?
I myself predominantly work in a 0.1 mm or 0.05 mm grid, with occasional
excursions to 0.5 mm. For this reason, I have my step size fixed at 0.05
mm. If I want to go from 0.1 to 0.5, I have to hit the G key 8 times, or
even 18 times to get at 1 mm (or take the scenic route through the menus).
In the many years that I worked with PCB, I never even once needed weird
grid sizes such as 0.35 or 0.8 or 0.95 mm. Are these grid sizes actually
used? Yes, I appreciate that, for instance, 0.65 mm can be useful when
creating certain SMD footprints, but even that would only be handy for
the chip pin pitch in one row. And even then, simply using 0.05 and just
counting along from a reference point is often quicker.
Any thoughts on this?
Best regards,
Richard
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