NetlistSVG¶

Introduction¶

netlistsvg is used by pcbdl to render a graphical output of the schematics.

It uses the “analog skin” to get something similar to what an engineer would draw for a board/pcb level design:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nturley/netlistsvg/master/doc/and.svg?sanitize=true

Netlistsvg’s Analog Example (TODO: replace drawing with a compact pcbdl example)¶

Installation¶

netlistsvg is written in javascript, to run it one needs both nodejs or npm. For debian style systems the following should do:

sudo apt install nodejs npm

One should plan for a location to install netlisvg, I recomend next to the pcbdl folder.

I recommend grabbing the https://github.com/amstan/netlistsvg/tree/for-pcbdl branch. It has a few tweaks that make netlistsvg outputs so much better, but the changes still need to be merged with the upstream project.

git clone -b for-pcbdl https://github.com/amstan/netlistsvg.git

Then it can be installed with npm:

cd netlistsvg
npm install .

Finally pcbdl neets to be told where netlistsvg is, this is done using an env variable. The default is assumed to be ~/netlistsvg. The following can be added to .bashrc or where the user normally stores env variables:

export NETLISTSVG_LOCATION=~/path/to/installed/netlistsvg

It can be tested by running make gh-pages in pcbdl/, a bunch of .svg files will be created in examples/.