Tim 🎮Sep 20, 2025

Hey, #Inkscape and/or #Fritzing gurus. A documented use of Inkscape is to create a custom outline for a printed circuit board that can then be imported into Fritzing: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Make-Custom-PCB-Shapes-with-Inkscape-and-Fr/

This requires manually creating a file with two sublayers with specific settings, which is tedious and error-prone if you aren't a frequent flyer with Inkscape. How hard would it be to script something to do this automatically - take one SVG with the outline, and output one with the right layers?

How to Make Custom PCB Shapes (with Inkscape and Fritzing)

How to Make Custom PCB Shapes (with Inkscape and Fritzing): If you are a beginner and need a PCB with custom shape... and need it in the shortest time as possible... OR if you don't want to spent a lot of time learning how to work with advanced softwares, because you make eventually a board or other... this …

Instructables
Show threadApocraphiliaSep 20, 2025
@timixretroplays I've done the manual steps in Inkscape once - seems like the XML munging you're describing shouldn't be too painful. Happy to pair on it? Would it be an Inkscape script?
Show threadTim 🎮
@apocraphilia I'm at step zero of this - I've done some programming in the past but not something like writing a script for Inkscape. I guess that's a possible solution, but a script for a command-line tool for XML editing or even some monolithic bit of code that parses and scrapes for the salient tags and copies stuff around would be a minimum viable thing for me. Probably #1 or #2 there would be smarter as every program is going to create an SVG slightly differently.
Sep 20, 2025 at 5:34amWeb