gEDA-user: PCB: Rotate in steps of 30 and 45 degree?

[Dan McMahill]

Florian Steiper wrote:
> DJ Delorie wrote:
> 
>>>Has anyone thought about doing a footprint rotating utility?
>>>    
>>
>>The problem isn't rotating the footprint, it's that nothing in pcb
>>expects pads to be other than orthogonal.  For example, the gerber
>>exporter can't plot angled lines with square corners, it would have to
>>draw them as filled polygons.  The autorouter doesn't know about them
>>either, nor does the optimizer.
>>
>>The other problem is, of course, loss of precision.  You end up
>>off-grid when you rotate back to zero.
>>  
> 
> 
> would this work if you would add a field that defines the angle of the
> part in the file format, so that the part is always stored at 0° but can
> be rotated to any value just by specifying a different angle ?
> 
> this would lead to a file format change though.....
> 

I would like to see that change even though it is a file format change.

There are other reasons too.  Makes updating footprints on an existing 
board easier (I think) and makes it possible to always extract what the 
rotation is.

-Dan