« Contents | gEDA gschem User Guide | Running gschem »

## Introduction

gschem is a schematic capture application, and is part of the gEDA (GPL Electronic Design Automation) toolset. It is used to draw electronic schematics, which describe the logical structure of an circuit. Schematics are made up of symbols, which represent the various components in the circuit, and are obtained either from a standard library or created by the user. The connections between components are represented by nets (wires). Schematics may be printed to a PostScript file for printing or further conversion to other output formats. Output to various image formats is also supported.

gschem can also be used for editing symbols for use in schematics, and for drawing block diagrams of electronics designs.

### Reading this guide

Several typographical conventions are used in this guide to describe things you might see in gschem or actions you might take.

- When key terms or concepts are introduced, an italic typeface is used. For example, “gschem's accepts a number of command-line arguments.”
- Keyboard keys or combinations of keys are shown like this: `Enter`. When two or more keys are to be pressed together, a ”+” character is used. For example, “To exit gschem, press `Alt`+`Q`.”
- Menu items in the various gschem menus are written using a bold typeface, and when a sequence of menu items are to be selected in order, a “→” character is used. For example: “To show the list of keybindings, select Help→Hotkeys.”

### Getting additional help

If you have a question about using gschem, you may wish to send a message to one of the gEDA mailing lists. Alternatively, you can ask your question on the geda Launchpad page, and one of the developers will try to answer it for you.

If you think you have found a bug in gschem, please file a bug report in the Launchpad bug tracker. Please add the tag “gschem”. It will help the developers to fix your problem quickly if you can describe in detail how to reproduce the bug.