X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com From: "Richard Rasker (rasker AT linetec DOT nl) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" Subject: [geda-user] Another PCB grid step question Message-ID: Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 10:46:25 +0100 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.6.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Language: en-US Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com 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