Author Topic: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams  (Read 5582 times)

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Offline oPossum

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #25 on: September 17, 2019, 11:52:41 pm »
Check the Black and Solid options in the Eagle print dialog.

 
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Offline magic

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #26 on: September 18, 2019, 07:12:13 am »
As for KiCAD, it just reminds me of practically every open source desktop app I have ever tried: raggedy as hell around the edges. You can tell that with OSS apps, no UI designer has ever been near them, with few exceptions. Do they get the job done? Yes. Are they pleasant to use? Rarely.

(And that's why the Mac remains my platform of choice: Mac developers tend to pay a lot more attention to UI consistency, making it less jarring and annoying to use apps from various developers than having to memorize different gesture and key conventions like on other platforms.)
UI consistency is sadly a pipe dream in the era of a dozen platforms which all want to "develop" and to "differentiate" themselves and applications which are ported back and forth as the OS fads change.
And an elephant in the room is that even the individual platforms aren't exactly UI-consistent over sufficiently long timespans, while a lot of professional software dates back decades.

Welcome to the brave new world of UI diversity :-DD

By the way, you get used to it over time. The amount of UI tricks invented so far is finite, at some point they just stop surprising you anymore.
It's all the genuinely novel fads coming from professional UI designers that I find most disruptive :P
 
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Online Zero999

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #27 on: September 18, 2019, 10:01:27 am »
As for KiCAD, it just reminds me of practically every open source desktop app I have ever tried: raggedy as hell around the edges. You can tell that with OSS apps, no UI designer has ever been near them, with few exceptions. Do they get the job done? Yes. Are they pleasant to use? Rarely.

(And that's why the Mac remains my platform of choice: Mac developers tend to pay a lot more attention to UI consistency, making it less jarring and annoying to use apps from various developers than having to memorize different gesture and key conventions like on other platforms.)
UI consistency is sadly a pipe dream in the era of a dozen platforms which all want to "develop" and to "differentiate" themselves and applications which are ported back and forth as the OS fads change.
And an elephant in the room is that even the individual platforms aren't exactly UI-consistent over sufficiently long timespans, while a lot of professional software dates back decades.

Welcome to the brave new world of UI diversity :-DD

By the way, you get used to it over time. The amount of UI tricks invented so far is finite, at some point they just stop surprising you anymore.
It's all the genuinely novel fads coming from professional UI designers that I find most disruptive :P
Windows 10 is a classic example of a inconsistent UI, even across the same OS, with traditional vs Metro Apps which use different toolkits, then MS Office is always different. People used to complain about Linux lacking a consistent GUI and look and feel but Windows has gotten much worse recently.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2019, 10:20:02 am by Zero999 »
 
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Offline jfiresto

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #28 on: September 18, 2019, 11:05:24 am »
As a test, I created a simple Eagle 6.6 schematic and did the following to add it to a simple document, all under OSX.
  • Print the schematic to a file, with a Scale Factor of 1, and Options: Black and Solid.
  • Open the printed PDF with Preview, crop the interesting bits with the "Select Tool" and use "Save As ..." to save the document as an unfiltered PDF.
  • Open TextEdit and create some text.
  • Drag and drop the cropped PDF into the document.
  • Save and print the RTF document.
Attached is the final PDF result, along with a ZIP file containing the schematic, RTF and intermediate products.

I have suffered worse and more tedious results. (For reference, I got fairly deep in desktop publishing when I was writing my book, but drifted out of it after Adobe orphaned my copies of both PageMaker and FrameMaker.)

Anyway, I hope that helps.
-John
 

Offline techman-001

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #29 on: September 18, 2019, 11:15:59 am »
As a test, I created a simple Eagle 6.6 schematic and did the following to add it to a simple document, all under OSX.
  • Print the schematic to a file, with a Scale Factor of 1, and Options: Black and Solid.
  • Open the printed PDF with Preview, crop the interesting bits with the "Select Tool" and use "Save As ..." to save the document as an unfiltered PDF.
  • Open TextEdit and create some text.
  • Drag and drop the cropped PDF into the document.
  • Save and print the RTF document.
Attached is the final PDF result, along with a ZIP file containing the schematic, RTF and intermediate products.

I have suffered worse and more tedious results. (For reference, I got fairly deep in desktop publishing when I was writing my book, but drifted out of it after Adobe orphaned my copies of both PageMaker and FrameMaker.)

Anyway, I hope that helps.

The OP did say " ... Kicad? EasyEDA?  Scheme-it?  Circuit Diagram?  Something else?  Free is important. ... " and Eagle isn't free apart from a crippled eval version.
 

Offline techman-001

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #30 on: September 18, 2019, 11:33:35 am »
I use gSCHEM which is a Free, GPL'd, easy to use Schematic Capture program.

Oh, I don't use gSCHEM currently, but yep for schematic capture, it's nice and can produce vector graphics as well. Last I checked, there wasn't really up-to-date binaries for Windows though (or MacOS for that matter), so if the OP isn't using Linux, that may be impractical. (And also, last I checked, that was a while ago, gSCHEM was hard to build on Windows/MSYS2 from source...)

<snip?

The OP did say "free is important" and as as Windows isn't free I assumed he may mean a Linux app.

As gEDA is Open Source and made by Linux programmers in their free time, naturally they compile gEDA for Linux or any Open Unix. They have no marketing budget or Windows/Mac machines so naturally there isn't a Windows or Mac binary unless a  Windows/Mac user ports it, the source is there ready for them to do so.

Of course the Windows users can avail themselves of a Virtual Machine such as "Virtual Box", install a Free Linux and load gEDA, that should be a no brainer these days ?

I love gSCHEM, it reminds me of my first Schematic Capture love, ORCAD for DOS when it was only a Schematic Capture. In time Orcad was ONLY available for Windows and was slow and buggy as a result (imho).

But gSCHEM is as fast today as Orcad was on DOS, has configurable fastkeys making a nice Function Key Keyboard legend doable (just like ORCAD for DOS), runs on every Open Unix I've tried ... what's not to love ?


 

Offline tooki

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #31 on: September 18, 2019, 12:07:04 pm »
UI consistency is sadly a pipe dream in the era of a dozen platforms which all want to "develop" and to "differentiate" themselves and applications which are ported back and forth as the OS fads change.
True, though it was more internal consistency I had in mind, not so much consistency between platforms. But your point is well taken. (I do find it interesting that in areas where the platforms have become more similar, it’s often been the Mac’s way that eventually took over. For example, how Windows now handles mouse scrolling and some text selection behaviors. Though examples of the opposite definitely exist, too — like keyboard shortcuts, which the Mac didn’t even have until Microsoft put them in Office for Mac in early 1985!!!)

And an elephant in the room is that even the individual platforms aren't exactly UI-consistent over sufficiently long timespans, while a lot of professional software dates back decades.
Ain’t that the truth!! :( As a long-time Mac user (since 1992), one of the things I dislike about the Apple of today is its much less rigid adherence to its own UI guidelines, as well as the watering down of the guidelines themselves. So while I still think the Mac has the best desktop UI overall, it’s not quite as predictable an interface as it once was. (Since that’s the whole point of UI consistency: total predictability of behavior.)

Welcome to the brave new world of UI diversity :-DD
Well, I wouldn’t call it new. We had a lot more UI creativity going on in the past. Pretty much every desktop UI in common use now is based on the original Mac’s UI fundamentals, which MS copied into Windows, and then Linux et al. copied from Windows. The only other branch of UI that exists in any way whatsoever is X-Windows from the classic UNIX workstations, but that’s practically irrelevant now.

By the way, you get used to it over time. The amount of UI tricks invented so far is finite, at some point they just stop surprising you anymore.
Nope. Some things I’ll never get used to. For example, I’ve been using Mac OS X full time since 2002 or so, and I still instinctively press ⌘-N to create a new folder in the Finder (as it did in classic Mac OS), but instead get a new Finder window. I don’t think I’ll ever un-learn that muscle memory. :P

It's all the genuinely novel fads coming from professional UI designers that I find most disruptive :P
Well, I think those come from designers who approach it from an artist’s POV, and not from the user’s. Gratuitous change does nothing but stroke the designer’s ego; IMHO, a gifted UI designer is focused on what works best for the user, and most of the time, that means “don’t be creative, do what users know and just reuse existing UI elements/behaviors”. That and look at what users actually try to do; if you see tons of users trying to do something one way instinctively, it’s worth considering making that a way to do it! :)

(Yes, I’ve worked as a UI designer. It bugged the hell out of me when good designs got shot down because they were “the way everyone does it”, or even just — I swear to god this is verbatim — “it’s not Swiss enough, [the usual, proven way] is too American”.  :wtf: Like... a good UI is a good UI, period.)
 

Offline brabus

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #32 on: September 18, 2019, 12:10:29 pm »
FidoCad or FidoCadJ.
 

Offline jfiresto

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #33 on: September 18, 2019, 12:28:42 pm »
... The OP did say " ... Kicad? EasyEDA?  Scheme-it?  Circuit Diagram?  Something else?  Free is important. ... " and Eagle isn't free apart from a crippled eval version.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but didn't the OP write that he would try Eagle next? He may not have meant that sort of "free" and may find Eagle is not so "crippled", particularly if he does not generate boards.

I am hardly an Eagle fan, but it was just (and still is?) a suggestion.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2019, 12:30:34 pm by jfiresto »
-John
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
« Reply #34 on: September 18, 2019, 02:13:35 pm »
Question... if you have drawn up a schematic in KiCad or Eagle, is it possible to render it in black & white (not grayscale) with heavier weight lines?

With KiCad, yup. You need to use the "Trace" function in the File dialog. Here you can select the exported file format, B&W or color, and the thickness of lines.
 


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