> Just as a matter of interest, what happens to curved tracks that are > placed by Freerouter and then imported into KiCad from a .SES file?
I also have need of curved tracks. When I looked into the seemingly curved tracks produced by Freerouter, zooming in showed them to be piecewise linear, and some way from smooth curves. If you do a bit of googling you'll find there is some discussion on the developers group about problems with using arcs on photoplotters. True arcs do seem to be a big deal, and are not widely supported in PCB packages (at least not in the ones I was able to download and try out). However, Eagle does support them, and it would be really nice if kicad did too. Although kicad allows the creation of arcs on non-copper layers it plots them as piecewise linear (and rather crudely too in the 2009 edition at least, though I think that might have been improved for the 2010 edition). If you want to tackle this issue one other area that would have to be addressed is creating and editing arcs. The kicad method is IMHO very clunky. It needs a graphical method of moving end points and adjusting the shape of the curve. Eagle seems to do that quite well. What Eagle doesn't do is use live DRC checking to prevent the track getting too close to another track, which of course is a very useful feature of kicad that would have to be built into arc creation and editing. It sounds like a lot of work to me, but if you have the time I think it would be worthwhile. Regards, Robert.
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