[sdiy] Schematics Software

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Sat, 20 May 2017, Neil Johnson wrote:
> For publication quality I use LaTeX with Stefan Krause's circdia:
> http://www.taylorgruppe.de/circdia/

If one is going to use LaTeX, there are several schematic packages.  My
favourite is Aplevich's "circuit macros" for quality of output, but its
interface (requiring separate compilation through an m4 interpreter) is
even more complicated than that of LaTeX in general.

   https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/Circuit_macros/

I use that for small example circuits in text.  For a complete schematic
of a board I would want to use something exported from a CAD program just
because of ease of editing.  KiCAD's print output converted into an EPS
file works pretty well even if not *quite* as pretty as what might be
achievable with circuit-macros.

Here's an example of what can be done using both:

   http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/temporary/cmexample.pdf

The large figure at the top of the second page is from KiCAD; the others
are all from circuit-macros.  Text obfuscated because this is part of the
manual to a product I haven't launched yet, but there's nothing really
secret in there.

-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/