During placement it is essential to identify groups of neighbored components. At this point I usually have a thorough understanding of the corresponding schematic. It would be extremely useful to select a group of parts in gschem and transfer the selection to pcb. Protel98 could do this, and we used it a lot. While there is no complete back- or forward annotation present in geda, this feature could be achieved with the help of the find function. A special gschem tool could identify the refdeses of all parts the current selection contains. Subsequently, it would write a pcb search string to the copy-paste buffer of X11. The user could paste this string with a middle mouse button click into the find dialog of pcb. And presto, all the components of a local module are selected. Next, you do "disperse selected elements" and you are ready to do the final placement.
This would significantly improve the placement work flow. ---<(kaimartin)>--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak http://lilalaser.de/blog _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
