First of all, yes, this can be helpful or annoying, depending on what one is trying to do.
For those popping into this thread, here is a description of the problem. I want to review the layers of a board for route quality, so I want to look at one layer at a time. Or perhaps I want to look, on a complex board, for an open routing path on a particular layer, and to draw a trace down that path. There are two ways to do this; one is to enable single layer display mode, the other is to disable all layers except for the one I want to examine plus "multilayer," the annoying superfluous layer that Protel has inflicted on us, and possibly an outline layer. (It had a reason for existence at one time, but that time is past). Either way produces the same display (I'm not sure there are no exceptions, but they looked the same to me when I just checked it.) (There is an option to include selected mech layers in single-layer mode, I think it is in the mech layer setup dialog.) However, Protel has an excellent feature. When you attempt to route (Place Interactive) a track, and start your route in contact with any copper, the route not only picks up the net of the copper, if any, but it also highlights all copper with the same net. Regardless of what layer this copper is on and whether or not that layer is display enabled. I would argue that this should be a disablable option, or, perhaps, it should not happen in single-layer mode. I prefer the former. But it cannot be disabled, as far as I could find. The highlight is not in the color of the track, so the suggestion to set the offending layer color to the background is actually the opposite of what one should do: set the layer color to the complement of the background color, since highlight is naturally the complement. So for a black background, a layer set to white will appear as black when highlighted. However, such track *also* has the focus, which means that it is outlined. You can still see it, it is just not quite so blatant. It is not necessary to redraw the screen to remove the highlight; all that is needed is to click anywhere in empty space in the workspace and the highlighted track from other layers will disappear. But, obviously, if you are routing, the current net is highighted, period. For inspection purposes, however, turning off the highlight by removing the focus from any net by clicking on empty space will suffice. One can then inspect all the layers in sequence, and for this single-layer mode is best. If it is necessary to reroute a track, normally the highlighting will not be *too* annoying, and it is one click to remove it. There is another shortcoming of the Protel display routines. Vias are intrinsically multilayer, yet blind and buried vias only appear on a limited number of layers. Protel does not correctly display this. I would suggest that multilayer *not* be part of the single-layer view; rather, a multilayer pad or via would be checked for presence on the view layer and would not appear if it was not present. (Right now there is no such thing as a blind or buried pad. That too is a shortcoming; basically, the pad/via distinction is largely artificial; I would have a pad attribute called "via," which would identify the pad as being used for routing only and not for mounting; free pads by default would be vias. Pads are better than vias because it is easier to define special rules keyed to the pad name whereas vias have no names. Yes, you could have square-pad vias. Why not? Allowing blind pads would simplify via-in-pad design.) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abdulrahman Lomax Easthampton, Massachusetts USA * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
