Here is my take on the pcb libraries; it basically agrees with Steve's. I personally do not know the ins and outs of M4 - I know just enough to toy with the M4 based libraries. That does not mean that M4 is bad, but I agree that *users* of pcb should not need to know M4.
Surprise! They don't. That's why I wrote the new style libraries, so nobody would be *required* to write M4 macros, including me. That I did not gut the M4 macro libraries from pcb was a good thing. Eventually it will be possible to remove them (at least to a separate tool folder), but anyone can safely ignore them now. I marked them all with ~ because many of the old library parts are just plain wrong and I want to avoid having any bad elements appear in the new libraries. Even so, the old libraries were very useful and it would have been a huge penalty to pcb to remove them completely and I had no chance of having the time and energy to validate the good ones. So they are still there. To the extent that keeps people from using pcb, that's really the fault of poor documentation. That's partly my fault too, but time is hard to find. You see I have 3 jobs and that doesn't include pcb (full-time-job, teaching evening graduate school, and consulting). I really, really hope to write an actual manual from scratch some day but it keeps getting put off. What needs to happen is to build an extensive library of known good land patterns. That's a lot harder than it sounds. I've previously proposed that a separate project on sourceforge be created specifically for pcb footprints. There are many troubles to overcome in this approach, but I think it is the best approach. Simply figuring out a workable organization of them is going to be tough. Unfortunately I don't have the time to administer such a project; I can barely keep up with pcb coding. To specifically answer Karel's question on e,b,c pin labeling: it's funny I changed the 2N3904 to an E,B,C style pin numbering when I first introduced alpha-numeric pin numbering. But I got so many complaints that I changed it back to numeric. What I recommend is that you do this: find a good TO92 package in the library (my recollection is that the "standard" M4 based one runs the silkscreen right across the pads so that's not good), then save it to a file, then edit that file and change the pin numbers to the desired letters, and put that file into the new library. harry
