On Apr 6, 2010, at 10:52 AM, Mark Rages wrote: > On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Anthony Shanks <[email protected]> wrote: >> Didn't bother with any kind of scripted footprint generator as I >> wanted to know exactly what the file format was for footprints. Once I >> discovered how easy it was I felt it wasn't worth fighting with a >> script that may or may not do what i needed to do. It's been working >> fine for me and I haven't had any problems with footprints thus far >> and I spent very little time making footprints compared with the rest >> of the layout process. > > For a programmer, it is easier to write a scripted footprint generator > than to roll a footprint by hand with a calculator and text editor.
Where the script really pays off is when you need to update/tweak the footprint. Staring at a bunch of numbers 3 weeks (or months) later is hopeless. So I pretty much use script-generated footprints because then I know how to update and regenerate them. In fact, all of my footprint generating tools emit the script command line as a comment embedded in the symbol, along with date stamp and other simple history. The idea is that I can get the exact same footprint back by cutting/pasting the comment into a command line prompt. Which of course is much less interesting than making some tweak to the command line to generate a slightly different footprint. Or, in the case where the script contains an error (that never happens..... :) it is easy to regenerate all the effected footprints. -dave _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
