X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Date: Wed, 2 May 2012 11:04:33 -0700 From: Andrew Poelstra To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: [geda-user] editing tracks in pcb Message-ID: <20120502180433.GC6951@malakian.lan> References: <4FA16C3B DOT 2030303 AT avtechpulse DOT com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4FA16C3B.2030303@avtechpulse.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-12-10) Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: geda-user AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 01:17:47PM -0400, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm playing with pcb, hoping to migrate to gEDA/pcb from Protel 99 > (which I've been keeping alive in virtual machines...) > Best of luck to you. :) > Can someone explain to me the "right way(s)" to edit/re-work tracks > in pcb? Right now, I find that if I don't like a track's routing, I > have to go and individually delete each segment in the problem area, > using delete or backspace, which is slow and inelegant. > > Is there a quick way to select and delete an entire (manually > routed) track? Or a portion of it? > It doesn't look like it. You can highlight an entire connection by pressing 'f' when the mouse is over it (and unhighlight with Shift+F), but I don't see how to delete tracks based on this. If you've got a lot to delete, you could do this, then open your .pcb in a text editor, delete all instances of "selected", then replace all instances of "found" with "selected". From there, backspace would work. However, if you've got a massive net, like GND or VCC, this might select too much, since it selects the entire electrical connection. We don't have a way to properly select a single trace. It would not be hard for us to write a "SelectAllFound" action to do the search-and-replace automatically. Nor would it be hard to write a "SelectTrace" action to select a single trace, if all it did was to follow lines and arcs to their end. Hopefully with summer coming, someone will have the time. > I guess pcb has no auto-loop-removal, like Protel. Is that right? > That is, if you add new path electrically in parallel with an old > path, the old section is automatically removed. Anything like that > in PCB? > Nope, sorry :). Our files are deliberately text-based to make them easy to hack, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has -- Andrew Poelstra Email: asp11 at sfu.ca OR apoelstra at wpsoftware.net Web: http://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew "You shouldn't trust every quote you read on the Internet." -- Socrates