i usually just take a screenshot of KiCad's PCB editor, wouldn't that be functionally the same?

Nice work. George! And a good, comprehensive writeup, too.

As for the issue of rendering in monochrome, if you were able to get the (color) images into Gimp then the solution was close at hand. Myself, I use Paint Shop Pro, but any decent image-editing software will let you adjust the color saturation up or down. And if you bring it down to zero, the result is monochrome!

-- Jeff

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Thanks Jeff - yes I can desaturate it, but I just find the result not very clear, it's not so easy to tell the difference between the layers, so I left the colours in.

After switching to a monochrome palette in the schematic editor though, just for exporting images, I quickly became used to it and started using it all the time - I wouldn't want to go back to using colours there!

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Yes I came across the need to avoid red vs green being one case, at work. It's interesting that there are glasses that can help somewhat.

We were advised to use red and blue instead, so perhaps that is a fine combination. In fact I just found this simulator where you can upload an image and try out various filters to see how it might be perceived: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis- ... simulator/ The original red and blue image I posted seems fairly good with this, perhaps that's why these colours are used by default in the software.

Forty years ago, when I first started drawing PCBs with coloured pencils and tracing paper, red and blue were the only options I was given!

No-one ever explained why; particularly as a broadcast engineer in a broadcasting company, 'perfect' colour vision was a job requirement...

Red and blue are the default front and back colours for Kicad, though I also got on well with their old red and green (and I think Eagle used red and green too).

Neil

edit: p.s. when exporting a schematic pdf from Kicad, there's a checkbox to select a monochrome output. I've not found a good way other than screen grabs to export the pcb, though.