Additional layers: can't select user-defined layers

[Alexander]

When exporting using Fabrication Toolkit, we have the ability to write the names of additional layers to be exported, but this doesn't include any user defined layers, e.g. User.[0-9]. It seems the layers you can use are hardcoded here:

Fabrication-Toolkit/plugins/config.py

Lines 15 to 56 in ab0b336

 plotPlan = [ 
     ("F.Cu", pcbnew.F_Cu, "Top Layer"), 
     ("B.Cu", pcbnew.B_Cu, "Bottom Layer"), 
     ("In1.Cu", pcbnew.In1_Cu, "Internal plane 1"), 
     ("In2.Cu", pcbnew.In2_Cu, "Internal plane 2"), 
     ("In3.Cu", pcbnew.In3_Cu, "Internal plane 3"), 
     ("In4.Cu", pcbnew.In4_Cu, "Internal plane 4"), 
     ("In5.Cu", pcbnew.In5_Cu, "Internal plane 5"), 
     ("In6.Cu", pcbnew.In6_Cu, "Internal plane 6"), 
     ("In7.Cu", pcbnew.In7_Cu, "Internal plane 7"), 
     ("In8.Cu", pcbnew.In8_Cu, "Internal plane 8"), 
     ("In9.Cu", pcbnew.In9_Cu, "Internal plane 9"), 
     ("In10.Cu", pcbnew.In10_Cu, "Internal plane 10"), 
     ("In11.Cu", pcbnew.In11_Cu, "Internal plane 11"), 
     ("In12.Cu", pcbnew.In12_Cu, "Internal plane 12"), 
     ("In13.Cu", pcbnew.In13_Cu, "Internal plane 13"), 
     ("In14.Cu", pcbnew.In14_Cu, "Internal plane 14"), 
     ("In15.Cu", pcbnew.In15_Cu, "Internal plane 15"), 
     ("In16.Cu", pcbnew.In16_Cu, "Internal plane 16"), 
     ("In17.Cu", pcbnew.In17_Cu, "Internal plane 17"), 
     ("In18.Cu", pcbnew.In18_Cu, "Internal plane 18"), 
     ("In19.Cu", pcbnew.In19_Cu, "Internal plane 19"), 
     ("In20.Cu", pcbnew.In20_Cu, "Internal plane 20"), 
     ("In21.Cu", pcbnew.In21_Cu, "Internal plane 21"), 
     ("In22.Cu", pcbnew.In22_Cu, "Internal plane 22"), 
     ("In23.Cu", pcbnew.In23_Cu, "Internal plane 23"), 
     ("In24.Cu", pcbnew.In24_Cu, "Internal plane 24"), 
     ("In25.Cu", pcbnew.In25_Cu, "Internal plane 25"), 
     ("In26.Cu", pcbnew.In26_Cu, "Internal plane 26"), 
     ("In27.Cu", pcbnew.In27_Cu, "Internal plane 27"), 
     ("In28.Cu", pcbnew.In28_Cu, "Internal plane 28"), 
     ("In29.Cu", pcbnew.In29_Cu, "Internal plane 29"), 
     ("In30.Cu", pcbnew.In30_Cu, "Internal plane 30"), 
     ("F.SilkS", pcbnew.F_SilkS, "Top Silkscreen"), 
     ("B.SilkS", pcbnew.B_SilkS, "Bottom Silkscreen"), 
     ("F.Mask", pcbnew.F_Mask, "Top Soldermask"), 
     ("B.Mask", pcbnew.B_Mask, "Bottom Soldermask"), 
     ("F.Paste", pcbnew.F_Paste, "Top Paste (Stencil)"), 
     ("B.Paste", pcbnew.B_Paste, "Bottom Paste (Stencil)"), 
     ("Edge.Cuts", pcbnew.Edge_Cuts, "Board Outline"), 
     ("User.Comments", pcbnew.Cmts_User, "User Comments") 
 ] 

I suggest using a way to dynamically get the enabled layers, such as

layers = []
i = pcbnew.PCBNEW_LAYER_ID_START
while i < pcbnew.PCBNEW_LAYER_ID_START + pcbnew.PCB_LAYER_ID_COUNT:
    layer_std_name = pcbnew.BOARD.GetStandardLayerName(i)
    layer_name = pcbnew.BOARD.GetLayerName(board, i)

    layers.append((layer_std_name, i, layer_name))
    i += 1

Adapted from Board2Pdf.

Additionally, the additional layers input box seems to support a list of comma-separated layer names.

Fabrication-Toolkit/plugins/process.py

Line 72 in ab0b336

 extra_layers = [element.strip() for element in extra_layers.strip().split(',') if element.strip()] 

This isn't very clear to the user, especially as the autocomplete doesn't acknowledge attempts at adding more than one layer, so I feel like some type hint would be useful.

I'm working on a PR to address these issues, but I'd like to hear some feedback about it here first.

[Benny Megidish]

Sounds good.
Regarding the autocomplete, I agree, I could not make it work properly for more than one layer, and the UI is quite limited and could not make it look nice, so I opted to ignore it.
If you could add it properly, I'm all for it.

[Alexander]

I've opened PR #152 that makes the autocomplete list dynamically generated. I tried to play around with having a list of layers underneath the text box that you could add/remove from, but couldn't get anything that looked nice, so for now I've just updated the textbox hint.

[Benny Megidish]

Thank you!