Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Eagle CAD 7.7 - purge?
Renate:
I'm still using Eagle CAD 7.7
I've resisted switching over to KiCAD because of the arcane file format.
Yes, the XML in Eagle is verbose, but at least clear.
I've always found using the enormous libraries annoying.
I usually use my own hand-picked/cleaned-up library.
Recently I knocked together a schematic of a dozen part taken directly from the stock libraries.
I was amazed to see that the schematic file was 0.5 Meg in size.
I'm used to CAD programs with a purge command, but it doesn't seem like Eagle has one.
Or did I miss it?
So I wrote a purger for Eagle.
One of the things that I then noticed is that libraries like resistor.lbr have enormous (15K) description fields of gooble-dee-gook HTML.
So now my schematic of a dozen parts is down to 40K, a reduction of 93%
I guess that in the 21st century we don't worry about file sizes. :(
nigelwright7557:
I wrote my own PCBCAD package in the 1990's.
At that time it was still mostly Assembler so my data structures were full of 16 bit values and 16 bit words full of bit fields.
This made it incredibly compact.
Most modern stuff uses files full of text so uses up more room.
I had a customer email me complaining that my CAD software requires .net framework 4 to be installed on XP before it will run.
He complained about the size of it.
I had to explain that its part of Windows now anyway and that quite a bit of software requires it to run.
Even C++ requires C++ runtime libraries to run.
And .net core requires runtime software.
Time has moved on and hard discs have grown in capacity and speed.
PKTKS:
There is a "thing" called EDIF...
Introduced in the late 80s and meant to solve
these issues of formats among EDA packages.
Neither one of the great ones even considered
changing a single bit of code to conform EDIF.
Closest one to EDIF was (and always in the advance) OrCAD
prior to their change to Cadence. OrCAD EDIF support is
one (if not the one) of the best.
Others went down the hole making each version a more
cumbersome version of their own formats. XML is not
exception...
Although some "translators" can be written based
on templates to convert XML to EDIF... no one ever
bother to use EDIF already ready.. decades ago.
Funny enough to see the problem is still the very same.
Nothing changed several decades after EDIF introduced
Paul
phil from seattle:
so what does your purger do exactly? and are you sharing it?
SiliconWizard:
Not sure I completely got what you meant.
Eagle XML file format: I have actually written a C library for parsing that, so I've worked closely on the format. I must admit it's rather well structured overall, and contains a lot of useful information that's often missing in many other CAD formats.
As far as size goes, Eagle files actually embed all parts that are used in them, so that makes the files 100% stand-alone, but that can make them pretty big too. I don't quite remember if it does embed more parts (from the same library) than what it exactly uses - I think I'm understanding (from what you're saying) that it does. Although it would make files "bloated" (so I get the idea of "purging"), it's also an interesting "feature", as it allows others to actually retrieve potentially interesting parts from a given Eagle file, effectively making any Eagle file (schematic, layout, library) a usable library in itself.
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