The origins of 6.0 (pun intended) (lp:#1773638)
Original report created by Jeff Young (jeyjey)
There have been some discussions in bug reports and on forums regarding the
various origins.
We currently have a file origin, which is fixed. It's absolute value is
somewhat immaterial as most board houses will use the edge cuts to position
the footprints. Essentially all it does is tell us where to draw the page
boundaries and page frame.
We also have a drill origin, which is user settable. I suspect this is
mostly legacy, as most manufacturers are happy enough without one. But
conceptually one could make an argument that it should set the origin for
/all/ file values, not just drill file values. This is probably a low
value change.
We also have a grid origin, which is user settable. Conceptually we think
of this as just a grid origin, but many of our users think of it as the
editing/display origin (which, to be honest, makes more sense).
When locations are edited through the UI, they are presented relative to
file origin. There's no particular value in this, while there would be
/considerable/ value in presenting them relative to the grid origin.
One bug report suggests adding textboxes for grid-relative positions to the
existing textboxes for file-relative positions. I believe this would be a
mistake as it just complicates the UI and the file-relative positions have
little value to the user.
For 6.0, I would recommend we change the GUI positions to grid-origin-
relative.
I can also see an argument for changing the file positions to drill-origin-
relative, but I'm ambivalent about that.