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Getting Started

The goal of this chapter is to give you enough information to learn how Pcb works and how to develop your layouts to make the best use of Pcb's features. All event translations (i.e. the buttons and keys you press) refer to the default application resource file shipped with Pcb. There is probably no need to change this unless your window manager uses some of the button events itself; however, if you want to customize the behavior of Pcb then changing the resource file is usually the best way to do it.

Get yourself a printout of this chapter and User Commands, if you haven't already done so, and follow the examples.

Start Pcb (the actual command will use all lower-case letters) without any additional options. If you get the error message:

         can't find default font-symbol-file 'default_font'
     

then the font searchpath or filename in the application resource
file is wrong. Be sure that your m4 program supports search paths. If not, get GNU m4. For other messages, see problems. Another quick-start is provided by pcbtest.sh in the src directory. If some features don't seem to work, try running pcbtest.sh, if that works, then Pcb hasn't been installed properly.