I am trying to finish up a board layout and I have been making changes to facilitate the routing of traces without so much crisscross. I am using FreePCB to do the layout and it is going very well. FreePCB has some issues and periodically pops up an error message, I click Ignore and save my work (on top of saving it every time I make a change). So far I have not lost one bit of work with the errors in FreePCB. So the frequent saves may be overkill.
Orcad, on the other hand, doesn't fail often. When it does fail, it usually offers to let you save your work. When you restart it, it knows it was shut down rather than having exited and will open the project you were working on. So again, I have lost little or no work.
But now Orcad is dropping a net from the net list. This is a net that had been listed just fine. I moved the pin it uses on the FPGA and now it is gone from the net list. I have checked and double checked the three connections to parts on this net and they all seem to be fine. Even so, if only one of the three pin connections were good, there would be errors. If two were good, it would still be in the net list, just with the third point missing.
The Orcad file format is closed and I can't do anything to try to fix this problem. The FreePCB file format, in contrast, is open and very readable. I can view it to see what is going on although I only did that when I started using the tool and didn't understand some things about it.
I thought about using an open source schematic editor when I started this project, but I didn't want to take the hit on the learning curve and I did not have a lot of confidence in a new tool (to me) not screwing up. Looks like I got that anyway.