| ID: | 5641 |
| From: | rn...@igor2.repo.hu |
| Date: | Fri, 13 May 2022 10:50:35 +0200 (CEST) |
| Subject: | Re: [pcb-rnd] poll RESULT: print dialog and certain exporters |
| in-reply-to: | 5624 from rn...@igor2.repo.hu |
| replies: | 5642 from rn...@igor2.repo.hu , 5643 from ka...@aspodata.se |
Thanks for everyone who replied, especially for those who did read the instructions and replied in the format requested. I had to completly throw out two emails because answers came in the wrong format. There were two more with slightly broken format. Some people should really try to _read_ before write! Results: whole email refused: 2 1. when last used lpr 0..1 year ago: 4 1..5 years ago: 2 5+ years: 1 never: 1 2. when calibrated 0..1 year ago: 0 1..5 years ago years: 0 5+ years: 2 never: 6 3. when fab @ home last 0..1 year ago: 1 1..5 years ago: 0 5+ years: 4 never: 3 4. when fab @ vendor 0..1 year ago: 5 1..5 years ago: 2 5+ years: 1 never: 0 Conclusions #1: 1. when last used lpr To my surprise a lot of users do use direct printing. Which means, again to my surprise, lpr still works. (Note: I didn't know because I never really used a desktop environment on Linux, which means I am sort of inexperienced with the current state of desktops for more than 22 years by now.) This means it makes sense to extend the existing lpr code to other ringdove apps - if it works in pcb-rnd, it will work in camv-rnd and in sch-rnd too. 2. when last calibrated This one was much less surprising: the printer calibration we inherited from pcb is a largely unknown feature. Plus the print code always used ps, which talks in physical dimensions, so whatever then processes the print request has a chance to either go on with physical dimensions or rely on some other printer calibration method. So I guess in the rare case you print for toner transfer or drilling, the only two cases where I can imagine calibration would matter, it just works without extra tweaking on modern printers/software. (I still do toner transfers ocassinally and that is my personal experience too.) 3. fab @ home No surprise: it's much less popular than 2 decades ago. Which sort of explains why you don't need to bother with calibration: if you printed it out only for documentation reasons, or to be used while populating the board, it doesn't matter if there's a few percent distortion in dimensions. (This was really a control question: a major mismatch between 2 and 3 would have triggered me asking details...) 4. fab @ fabhouse As expected, most of our users are doing this. This is the workflow where you rarely print, or if you do, you won't do it to send the paper to the fab house directly. So printer calibration doesn't matter for this workflow. Conclusions #2: I'm keeping export_lpr feature set as is in pcb-rnd. I've split the code and started moving most of it to librnd so other ringdove apps can have similar printing. For now I am keeping printer calibration in pcb-rnd, but I am not going to reproduce it in other apps: - in case of camv-rnd it may make sense, like if you print some drill map from gerber and put it on the board; but I think such use case is so rare that in case direct printing is not accurate enough the user should simply fall back to manual calibration (so export to ps and printing by hand) - in case of sch-rnd calibration doesn't make sense as we are not drawing in physical units Calibration doesn't take a lot of code or complication in the code, so I will probably keep it as is in pcb-rnd even long term. But I am not going to complicate it, like it won't get some fancy interactive frontend or smarter compensation (e.g. to overcome uneven distortion). It's also clear that majority of our user base has moved or is moving away from home etched boards, which means our policy on the print feature should be biased toward "printed for documentation purposes" instead of "printed for physical fabbing". Best regards, Igor2
Reply subtree:
5641 Re: [pcb-rnd] poll RESULT: print dialog and certain exporters from rn...@igor2.repo.hu
5642 Re: [pcb-rnd] poll CONCLUSION: please test pcb-rnd svn HEAD from rn...@igor2.repo.hu
5643 printer calibration from ka...@aspodata.se
5644 Re: printer calibration (Re: [pcb-rnd] poll RESULT: print dialog from rn...@igor2.repo.hu
5645 Re: printer calibration (Re: [pcb-rnd] poll RESULT: print dialog and from John Griessen <jo...@cibolo.com>