But how can you just flip horizontally the back?
Like sparkydog said: you select the one object, then select
Object >
Flip Horizontal (or press
H).
All operations in Inkscape affect the
currently selected object. When you use the
Selector tool, the topmost one on the left side (the mouse cursor one), you can click on any object to select it, or press Shift and click on objects to add to or remove from the set of selected objects. For example, in my SVG file, the background image is object "image837" (I was too lazy to rename them!), and when selected, it is shown highlighted in the
Layers and Objects pane, under the
Back layer. (The layer is automatically expanded.)
At the bottom of the Inkscape window, there is a status bar, which will tell you exactly what is currently selected. When you have an image selected, it will tell you "Image
width×
height: embedded in layer
Layer." with the size in currently selected units (my SVG has them all in "pixels", "px"). Images can also be just
linked, or referred to by path. When you copy or move the SVG file, the image file must move accordingly.
When you have for example all the traces selected on Back-Traces layer, it will say "67 objects of type Path in layer Back-Traces."
And how did you choose the dots and lines in your drawing for the trace? Which option did you choose the dot and and the lines here?
I showed that explicitly in reply #8, the loop123-stroke.png image:
After you draw a polyline using the
Pen tool (the one just under the spiral on the left side toolbar), its properties are shown in the
Fill and Stroke pane.
Markers generate the small end dots,
Join determines how corners in the polyline are drawn,
Cap determines how end caps are drawn (except in this case, they will be hidden by the end dots anyway), and
Order determines the order in which fills and strokes and end dots are drawn; I selected the first one, fills on the bottom, then strokes on top of fills, with end markers on top.
There is no fill (on
Fill pane, the × is selected, with text
No paint shown below); the stroke is red (I use RGB, RGBA = ff0000ff; equivalently RGB = 255, 0, 0, 100; equivalently HSL = 0, 100, 50, 100).
In
Edit >
Preferences,
Tools,
Pen Tool, you can select either
Last used style, or
This tools own style:. If you like a specific style (here, 2px wide red lines), you can select such a line you have already drawn, and click on the
Take from Selection button in that dialog, to set it as the default.
For the markers, the size and shape is dictated by which one you select in the list. These do not typically "stick", and you need to set them for each polyline separately. However, you can use
Edit >
Select All (or press
Ctrl+
A) to select all objects in the current layer, and then set the end markers for all of them at once. In other words, you can leave the end markers alone when drawing, and just set them for all traces on the current layer at once. (On my machine, this is for some odd reason slow, so I do tend to set them immediately when I end a polyline (using right-click).)
If you haven't already discovered it, ctrl-shift-V will change the style of the selected object to match the style of whatever you last copied. That's really useful when you just changed the style of one object and realize there are three others you want to look the same.
Ah yes: equivalent to
Edit >
Paste... >
Style. Nice!
Until very recently, I used Inkscape 0.92 (in Linux Mint 20.3 Una), and it did not have this feature yet, so this was an useful discovery for me too; thanks!
In
File >
Document Properties, there are three extremely useful sub-panes:
- Display
This lets you define the logical size of the document being manipulated. When the output is printed media, it is useful to use inches or centimeters or millimeters here, because that way the output is exact. (If you have a correctly set-up and accurate printer, you can print anything in exact size, including PCB images, from SVG files.)
When the output is scalable digital media, with no set physical size per se, I like to use the Custom format in pixels (px) with Scale = 1.000. Then, the ViewBox setting determines the coordinate range displayed. When opened in e.g. a browser, the ViewBox setting is then the key; the browser will automatically scale the SVG to fit the usable area. If opened directly in a browser, it will fit the window width; if referred to as an image in say a forum post, it will scale to the post area width. In all cases, it is as sharp as is possible, with no degradation in quality, no matter how large they are zoomed. This is because the Paths (polylines and curves) are vector elements, defined mathematically.
- License
This lets you define the license of the SVG file. This too is new (compared to 0.92, which I used for years). I could not set it, because I did not know loop123's stance towards the copyright of the board images. If I had set it, it would be CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which basically means "Everyone can do whatever they like with this document; the author does not assert any copyrights to it". In forums like this one, it is especially useful, because it is embedded in the file itself, and specifically lets others know they are free to modify and reuse the image. In general, the other Creative Commons licenses listed there are equally useful.
- Grids
Grid is a placement aid, enabled whenever you have Snap to grid enabled. Each grid is specific to the SVG file being edited (it is stored in the SVG file itself), and you can have as many grids as you like. Rectangular grid is what you'd expect, and axonometric grid is typically used to define a triangular grid.
This is basically what makes Inkscape so useful when drawing diagrams and such: you just define a suitable grid, enable snap to grid, and everything you draw will automatically snap to grid intersections. At any point, you can turn off the grid (# key), or enable/disable snap to grid (% key), and instead use e.g. snap to centers, vertices, intersections, et cetera.
In this particular case, because we are drawing on top of a photograph, the grid isn't very useful.
I particularly like to use a regular rectangular grid to draw 3D diagrams in 2:1 isometric view:
[img width=128]https://www.nominal-animal.net/answers/cube.svg[/img]The displayed (optimized) version (
cube.svg) is a tiny, 1153-byte file; and the Inkscape original (
cube.inkscape.svg) contains the grid and other settings making it very easy to modify. The reason the displayed version by default scales to the maximum size is that it has
viewboxing enabled when saving the optimized version. This means the SVG file does not claim a specific width or height, only describes its displayed coordinate range (viewbox!).
To repeat, because these are
vector graphics, they can be scaled indefinitely large or small without any degradation in the image quality.
The way paths (traces, when tracing two-sided PCBs) can be
combined (in all vector graphics programs, not just in Inkscape) means you can eventually combine each connected net to a single path, which in turn helps when tracing pad, via, and through-hole connections. Personally, at that phase, I would keep both KiCAD/EasyEDA/some other schematic capture program open at the same time as examining the connections in Inkscape, with the board and a multimeter (in either ohms mode, or diode connectivity) nearby, to draw the relevant part of the schematic.
Please note that although I'm familiar with these tools, I did not recommend this approach to solve the underlying problem because I
like these tools, but because I've found these tools to be efficient when doing this sort of stuff. The reason I do not recommend directly trying to capture the schematic, is that it is extremely difficult to see things you do not expect when looking for something; in other words, that directly tracing the schematic based on probing the PCB, is just too error-prone, because of the limitations and nature of the human
focus when concentrating on something and expecting a specific result. (For proof of this, please view the
selective attention test youtube video. I guarantee you will be surprised by the result.)
Instead, the underlying problem is divided into separate tasks where you do not expect anything specific, and are trying to capture
all details, keeping your eyes open. This reduces the number of errors and mistakes, and also lowers the cognitive load (making the task easier), and makes the entire process more efficient.
Yes, there is a steep learning curve, but I assume the way I created the PCB tracks from the two partial images shown, is proof that this approach does work; although the next step, combining the connected traces to single paths, and then using that information to create the relevant schematic, is yet to be done.
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