Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2021 10:14:37 -0400
From: "Stephen C. Menasian (menasian AT ptd DOT net) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: [geda-user] Thank you - some requests and an offer
Message-ID: <20210707101437.2c7c63a6@queeg>
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

Thank you very much for reviving the gEDA project. gschem has been my
schematic capture program of choice since it was in the beta stage. When
support seemed to have vanished a while ago, I continued to use my old
(locally compiled) version. The substitute offered by Fedora (Kicad, I
think) was not to my liking and there seemed to be no tools to port all
my gschem schematic and symbol files to the Kicad platform. When I found
that gschem support was revived, I was overjoyed.

Now to my requests. I apologize if these requests are already somewhere
in the mailing list; I haven't gone through all the past postings. 

1) The old gschem had an option in the print dialog to print the visible
region of the schematic. I used this frequently for several reasons - for
example, to have an uncluttered large scale print of a part of the
schematic while developing a circuit. This option is missing in the
present release; it would be nice to have it back. My current workaround
is cumbersome. I export to pdf with the highest possible resolution, open
the pdf in GIMP, crop and scale it and print the result.

2) The old gschem behaved thusly when a part (or portion of a circuit)
was selected and copied (at least the way I had set up my gschemrc):
The selection remained with the originally selected part(s) after the
copy and the new copy was not selected. The new gschem transfers the
selection to the copy when it is placed. It would be nice to have a
gschemrc option to allow the selection to remain with the original part.

Finally, an offer. I have written a C program which I call "geda_parts".
It reads a .sch file and creates an almost publishable parts list. For
example: "geda_parts xxyy.sch R" would produce a file "xxyy_R.parts"
which lists all the resistors in numerical order. This file is also useful
for finding duplicated reference designators and holes in the reference
designator sequence. It currently works for most of the common part types
(resistors, capacitors, transistors, ICs, inductors, etc,). I have yet to
make some modifications to handle multislot ICs and will probably do some
more cleaning up but, if there is any interest, I can post the source
once it is stable.