Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for electronics and electrical engineering professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Looking at a this buttons recommended footprint, I found these irregularly shaped pads:
The protrusions from the pads are way to small to act as solder thieves, and the button itself has gull wing pins that don't mimic the form of those pads in any way:
What is the purpose of the odd shape of those pads? Is there any reason why I shouldn't just draw those pads as rectangles on my PCB layout?
I saw many datasheets and created many custom devices in EAGLE, this one is not much complex and does not involve many calculations although I tend to agree with commenters to your question that there might be better ways to describe the part's footprint.
Please notice the caption under the drawing: it says mounting rather than board footprint or whatever. This shows shape of soldering area, not shape of the pad itself. Big areas are intended for close contact with button's pins, while small perpendicular areas seem to be designed for extra solder "pour out" space.
You can make pad of any shape given the areas drawn on the mounting schematic is not covered by the solder mask.
