Pack and Move footprints: improvement ideas
Description
Kicad v7 introduced the new "Pack and Move Footprints" command, and it has become a very useful and often used tool during the last projects.
I noticed these two small annoyances / disadvantages during this time:
- the grabbing point of the first grabbed footprint (either if one or multiple footprints are selected) seems not reliable. It seems always to be a pad, but not always the same.
- wish #1: use always the anchor-point of the grabbing footprint for the moving (improves reliability and consistency). For all who want to move the group by a different grabbing point: the legacy move-mode (which selects the grabbing point in relation to the mouse-position) is still available.
- for multiple selected footprints: the gap between the footprints (from one footprint-courtyard to next footprint courtyard, or bounding box) seems to be a arbitrary value in the source code. This completely ignores the current grid-setting and places the footprints with 99,9% reliability offgrid.
- wish #2: after calculating the footprint-position with the current placing-algorithm: try to rounding-up the coordinate-position to the next nearest grid-values. Do this only if the grid is not to coarse (or maybe also with coarse grid - depends a little on user feedback). This ensures that the footprints end up on grid.
Steps to reproduce
- use "Packand Move footprints" command
- observe #1: grabbing footprint is grabbed on different points, but never on the anchor point
- observe #2: all additional footprints are placed offgrid
KiCad Version
Application: KiCad PCB Editor x64 on x64
Version: 7.99.0-443-g6a46dbd306, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.2
FreeType 2.12.1
HarfBuzz 6.0.0
FontConfig 2.14.1
Platform: Windows 10 (build 19044), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
wxWidgets: 3.2.2 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.81.0
OCC: 7.6.2
Curl: 7.87.0-DEV
ngspice: 39
Compiler: Visual C++ 1934 without C++ ABI
Build settings:
KICAD_SPICE=ON
Edited by Maik Freitag