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File Format

Human-Readable

LibrePCB stores all libraries and projects in human-readable text files. This has many advantages:

  • When using a version control system, you’ll see and understand the changes.

  • Within some limits, it even allows to use branching and merging.

  • In case of an invalid file (e.g. due to wrong merge conflict resolution), issues can be fixed by hand in a simple text editor.

  • It allows to automatically generate, modify or extract information from files with custom tools (e.g. scripts).

Minimal Diffs

But using a random text-based file format is not enough. The applicability of version control systems is heavily improved by the following things:

  • User-related settings (e.g. canvas position, layer colors, …​) are strictly separated from functional settings, to allow ignoring them by the VCS.

  • The file format is canonical, i.e. for any imaginable data set there exists only one exact representation.

  • Line breaks are controlled to get a good balance between length of lines and number of lines.

  • Non-informative content is minimized (e.g. syntax elements).

To fulfil all these requirements, LibrePCB uses a file format based on S-Expressions. Since this format only specifies the very basic syntax, we have the full control over the used data types, formatting etc. If you’re interested in an example, check out our official resistor symbol.

Git diff

Self-Contained

A LibrePCB project is 100% self-contained — enforced by the tool, there’s no way to break this rule. In particular, a project contains:

  • All library symbols, footprints, components and devices it depends on

  • All stroke fonts used within boards

  • All relevant settings

Therefore you can open a LibrePCB project on any computer and it will always look exactly the same — no matter on which operating system, no matter which libraries are installed and no matter how you configured LibrePCB.

Schematic fonts are bundled with LibrePCB and are the same on all platforms (i.e. schematics don’t use system fonts) to even make schematics independent of the environment. Thus it’s not required to also embed these fonts within projects (these are quite large binary blobs).

Strictly Stable & Versioned

Already had the issue that a PCB project was broken after downgrading to an older tool version? Or already had troubles with several people working on the same project are constantly reverting each others modifications because they didn’t use exactly the same tool version?

Things like that cannot happen with LibrePCB. The file format of libraries and projects is completely freezed between major releases. For example LibrePCB v1.999 still uses exactly the same file format as v1.0, so your team can work with any v1.x release on the same project without troubles.

In addition, downgrading to an older major version is explicitly rejected by the tool since this is usually a destructive, dangerous operation.

For more details about the file format versioning, check out the specifications.