Known Bugs and Issues

SR command (step-and-repeat) is not supported currently. "AM" macro expansion does not work as expected: parameter expansion sometimes fails and the macro expansion does not use the units at defintion but at instantiation.

Layers are not copied to the current position but rather at the end of the layer tree.

OASIS circles are represented as single-point paths with round ends. Such paths should be written as "R" round flash primitives to CIF.

"Save Current Cell As" alters the state of the view. In effect, another "Save" or "Save Current Cell As" does not give the expected result. In particular, "Save" will repeat "Save Current Cell As" and not save the whole layout.

Images consume more memory than they are expected to. A single RGB pixel has a footprint of 15 Bytes.

Currently, the time written into the GDS timestamp entries for BGNLIB and BGNSTR is a dummy value.

In some cases, in particular when writing layers with GDS layer/datatype plus a name, the DXF writer will create layer names with blanks in it. AutoCAD does not accept such files.

Foreground objects (i.e. rulers) are not rendered correctly in the printout.

The largest cell is selected which may not necessarily a top cell.

The PCB importer does not accept many Excellon drill files, in particular when they contain routes.

That feature is not intended and does not work correctly.

Currently, Reset does not immediately reset the configuration.

Due to internal 32bit-processing, some g-deltas can be subject to overflow which gives wrong coordinates.

The clip function does not work correctly if empty cells are present.

Some problems have been reported when using Ruby script and the Ruby 1.9 interpreter. This is in particular the case in the Windows executable. "Dir.glob" does not work correctly for example.

The automatic detection of the GDS2Text format fails in some cases.

Layouts with large coordinates are not written to OASIS correctly in some cases.

The geometrical content of the instance is not drawn correctly in some cases.

When directly reading a PCB project (without using the assistant), some functions are broken (Bottom mounting mode, top cell, DBU).

The reader does not correctly handle check names with a dot.

The first tab's name is not read.

The navigator is broken. It is not functional if KLayout is closed with the navigator open.

Arc interpolation of polylines does not work correctly.

Bulges are not supported for polylines.

Select (transient or on click) is slow in some cases. This happens in particular if cells in the hierarchy overlap heavily and many layers are present.

The edges will be reported to intersect even if they don't. A workaround is to test if the bounding boxes overlap and the edges intersect.

Some POLYLINE examples were using a global width which was overridden by a per-vertex width. In that case the global width is taken rather than the correct local one.

On KDE, files cannot be opened when the path contains non-ASCII characters on UTF-8 file systems. In some cases, the decimal point is inconsistently ',' instead of '.' which is the standard for KLayout.

The CIF reader currently does not understand "DS" commands without a scale specification (i.e. "DS 20"). It always requires two additional numbers specifying the scale as a ratio of two integers (i.e. "DS 20 1 10").

The clockwise rotate method rotates counterclockwise and vice versa.

Much is drawn and much more isn't ...

On some systems, the program crashes when a ruby script is loaded (i.e. with the "-rm" option) with a message "[BUG] terminated node (0x2a9708ca70)" or similar. This seems in particular to

In particular, interpretation of POLYLINE and LWPOLYLINE entities is not clear yet. In comparison to other converters, no merging of separate lines into polygons is provided.

This is important, because const RdbItem objects are commonly encountered when scanning through a marker database with RBA.

The interpretation of certain features (i.e. array instances, extrusion direction) is not clear yet.

Incorrect layers are written for example when a layer subset is written. In addition, mapping or selection of input layers does not work correctly for DXF and CIF readers.

The program does not remember reader options when the dialog is closed.

A segmentation fault occurs on Windows in the "each_selected" method of LayoutView.

DXF and CIF readers and writers implement only very basic features. Some important capabilities are missing, in particular for the DXF part.

When the marker browser is opened with a maximum number of markers set to a value not equal to 1000 (the default), the program crashes if the marker browser window is opened from the menu (it works when the marker database is loaded from the command line with the -m switch).

This bug is related to branching conditions. In such cases, a net might not be extracted correctly.

The "outline" macro is read as a thin outline also in the "closed" case by the RS274X reader.

When the GDS2 writer has to reduce the number of points of a polygon, it will cut the polygon into smaller pieces. Under some circumstances, this algorithm fails. To avoid this problem, use the Multi XY record mode if possible.

Due to a bug in Qt's QPixmap constructor in Qt 4.6.0, KLayout does not work with this version.

In most cases, ruby modules are not looked for in the wrong path. The intention was to search for ".rbm" files in the directory where KLayout is installed. Instead, the current or any other directory is searched depending on how the KLayout executable is specified on the command line.

The OASIS reader does not accept files with forward references of the special "S_GDS_PROPNAME" property name.

In some cases, array references are not considered and layers appear to be empty even if they are not.

That is a ruby problem (http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/198545). The problem is known and a new libruby version should be available soon.

In some build environments, problems have been encountered with GDS text files with negative values.

The interactive stretching of images with the square handles is sometimes leading to invalid results and does not work properly.

The item list is abbreviated using a dummy item labelled "...". When clicking at this item, the application crashes.

This feature marks a layer "unused" when now shape is shown on that layer in the view area. Currently, the application becomes very slow in some cases when this option is used.

When the layout is empty (no cell present, i.e. top cell was deleted) and "Instance" mode is selected in editor mode, the program crashes with an internal error.

There are still some issues on Mac OS X, as well for the build as for the program itself - in particular with Qt 4.5.x. For example, with accessibility enabled, the program crashes when a file is loaded. This will be fixed in version 0.18.1.

The sizing function sometimes produces invalid results, in particular when doing a strong undersize.

The 'ar' call has been changed such that the Mac OS X build should work now (not tested since no test system was available).

When double-clicking on a path end in partial edit mode (dragging just the path end), the program crashed in some cases.

Not all instances are taken into account.

The DBU per user unit is used, which is not correct. Instead the DBU per meter unit should be used.

Strange effects occure when a non-modal front dialog is moved over the canvas area.

Space characters are not represented.

When the properties dialog is closed using the system menu (the "X" button in the window title bar), KLayout goes into an unusable state. This does not happen if the dialog is closed using the "Close" button.

This happens if more than 100 text objects are present that have identical locations.

This was a known limitation but came up recently in a certain application.

In GDS files, row and column vectors can be arbitrary x/y value pairs. However, some tools implement a more strict interpretation in which only orthogonal row and column vectors are allowed. Also, row and column must be oriented in a certain way. In addition, the description of row and column vectors is swapped.

Apparently due to a problem with Qt's grabMouse function on some Windows installations the display freezes when a zoom box or selection box is opened. By switching to the Task manager using "Ctrl+Alt+Del", the display can be unfrozen but zoom or selection operations a not possible. This problem existed in all previous versions as well and apparently occured in particular on Windows XP.

In certain cases, the closing point of polygons was not created correctly, path segments did not snap correctly to 45 degree edges or partial edit mode was behaving in a strange way.

... which is contrary to what other programs implement.

This happened because many markers have been drawn for such arrays. This has been changed such that the array is not drawn as individual markers for large arrays. Instead, a representative geometrical description is given.

KLayout won't link unless ruby support is enabled (-rblib, -rbinc on build.sh given).

The file names are not stored properly in the config file - thus "open recent" does not work since backslashes are dropped.

Sometimes an error is issued saying that the requested layer already exist (but it does not). Undo support is not implemented correctly.

Under certain circumstances, child cells are shown multiple times in the cell tree, i.e. a cell "A" which is a child of "TOP" might appear multiple times in the tree below "TOP". This is not intended - child cells are supposed to appear just once, even if instantiated multiple times.

If the layers to be saved are confined, i.e. to visibles ones, it may happen that, if no layer is visible for example, all layers are saved instead. A workaround is to create a new layer (i.e. layer 1000, datatype 0) and save it. Such an empty layer will be saved but won't appear in the OASIS or GDS2 file, since it does not contain any shapes.

Depending on the transformation of the text, the text may appear at unexpected locations for example. A workaround is to use the "default" font.

On windows, crashes have been observed, when the program is started the first time after installation. This indicates some problem with Qt installation in the registry. However, this bug was not tracked down yet, because it is not easy to reproduce. Since it only happens once, it is not considered pretty serious.

The program crashes on Windows, if the layer list becomes too small to be displayed. This happens for example, if at the default size of the program window, the color panel, the frame color panel and the stipple panel are opened in that order. Then, the height of the layer list becomes a few pixels and the program crashes.

This problem has been found on the 64bit Ubuntu 7.10 platform for example. The program does not start up and exits immediately with a segmentation fault.

Here is a small patch that fixes that problem:

layApplication.h:53
  Application (int &argc, char *argv []);
instead of:
  Application (int argc, char *argv []);

layApplication.cc:50
  Application::Application (int &argc, char *argv [])
instead of:
  Application::Application (int argc, char *argv [])