Quickly Show/Hide Copper Areas

[GarretF]

This post is part of a series on what's new in Circuit Design Suite 12.0

Copper areas and power planes occupy a significant amount of the board real estate. As such, then can cover up other features on the board. You can control the visibility of all objects on a particular layer using the Layers tab in the Design Toolbox. Click the check box to the left and see items on that layer go between visible, dimmed (semi-transparent) and hidden.

Changing layer visibility doesn't help if the copper areas that were blocking your view is on one of the layers of interest. Ultiboard has another option, buried in the Global preferences on the PCB Design tab: the Show copper areas option. This option is so helpful that I've always wished I could quickly access this through the View menu. In version 12.0, now you can as the Copper areas item! You can even assign it a shortcut key.