Re: New CAD design questions.

Embedding the parts in the schematic file is a good thing as it makes
the project portable and self-archivable.

The downside is that it's harder to fix a bug in a library part
and or share library info with other designs.

The original question was ascii or binary. You tossed in another
interesting consideration: archiving.

My preference is lots of small tools rather than one big GUI mess.
A major advantage is that I can often do something that the
one-big-package doesn't do.

What I really want is something like make and the tools to generate
a makefile so I can easily be sure that I have done all the steps
I need to do when making gerbers and archiving everything.

Lots of small tools generally work better with ascii than binary.

If the performance hit is serious, I'm happy using binary
files as long as there is a simple way to translate beetween
them. I'd be surprised if that happens at the board layout
level - maybe for large boards.

--
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.

.