Allow any rectangle (bounding box) to be annotated for board separation

[markh-de]

Prerequisites

• I have read the documentation and the proposed feature is not implemented.

Description

If you use board outline annotation for the separate command, you need to place the annotation footprint onto the actual PCB edge.

Now, if you have connectors that have their origin way outside the board (because they are placed relative to the enclosure) and also have the other board too close to the board-to-be-extracted (so that there is no useful tolerance distance), you need to use the rectangle (bounding box) method. This works great, but it requires you to manage the bounding box coordinates outside of your board/panel design (e.g. in an extraction wrapper script). So you need to take great care to keep them in sync if you move/resize things around in your design.

My feature suggestion:

Please allow the annotate method to annotate any (straight) rectangle on any layer (as fallback, in case the annotate footprint is not placed on a real board outline) and then use the tl/br coordinates of that rectangle to get the bounding box. This would allow users to manage their extraction bounding boxes directly in their design without headaches.

Thank you so much for KiKit! ❤️