Hi,
When I draw a schematics, sometimes I need to resize a sheet block in the root sheet.
I found it contains 4 movable point in 4 corners of sheet block, and I can drag the point to any direction to resize the sheet block, but some times I only wnat to resize a sheet block in vertical or horizontal direction, how can I achieve this?
If you want to change the horizontal size, move your mouse horizontally.
If you want to change the vertical size, move your mouse vertically.
It’s easier t do this if you zoom in more and also when you keep the edge you do not want to resize near the edge of the Schematic Editor window so you can use it as a reference.
No, it’s hard to do this because I can move the point in any direction freely, espeacially when the grid I set is small, it’s hard for me to keep the moving only in one direction.
Let’s refer to the design of PADS(Altium Designer is also the same):
After highlight the sheet block, it contains a point in the middle of each edge, and when I drag these points, the block will be resized only in 1 direction, I think this is a good solution for me.
This is a quite serious mistake:
Never set the grid in KiCad to something smaller then “50mil”. It can lead to quite serious errors in the schematic because it makes it difficult to connect the wires to the pins of schematic symbols. All of KiCad’s schematic symbols are also designed to fit on this grid.
This is also quite important for the boxes for the hierarchical sheets. If the edges of these are not on a “50mil” grid then you will get into trouble while trying to connect wires to the imported hierarchical pins.
Working on this grid size is so important that I don’t really understand why KiCad even lets you use a smaller grid (at least for schematic symbols, wires and labels). The placement of other tings such as texts can be fine tuned by holding the [Ctrl] key while dragging them.
On such a coarse grid it’s quite easy to resize a hierarchical sheet box only horizontally or vertically. On top of that, the sizes of those sheets are not very important either, and I guess the combination of those factors is the reason why the resize handles for only stretching horizontally or vertically have never been implemented.
Grab and hold a corner point with the mouse, then press a keyboard arrow key repeatedly or keep it pressed down.
espeacially when the grid I set is small, it’s hard for me to keep the moving only in one direction.
+1 for the advice of paul: just don’t set the the grid to a small value for normal work.
If you really can’t live without the horizontal/vertical dragging feature: login to gitlab and upvote (click on the thumbs-up icon below the original post) Hierarchical sheet improvement by adding "handles" to the middles of contour lines (#11525) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab.
But: How often do you resize a sheet?
Hi Eelik, this solution only works if current schematic grid is the same as the block grid. If they are different, when I click the corner point, it will snap the grid first, so it will be moved in both vertical and horizontal direction. And if I forget the original block grid, I need to re-draw this block(and maybe the related connection block).
Another +1 for the advice about the grid above. KiCad schematic editor isn’t meant for graphics work. Everything except some small details (maybe text positioning and some symbol graphics) should use the recommended common coarse grid. If sheet blocks snapping to grid are now a problem, you will run into greater problems later.
Working on another grid of 50mil in the Schematic Editor leads to all sorts of problems, and you’ve started to encounter some of them. Your schematic has already become off grid, and instead of trying to remember on what sort of things you did some things, it’s much better to fix the underlying grid issue. Luckily in KiCad V6 this is relatively easy.
to do this:
Connections (both wires to pins, and wires to hierarchical pins) should look clean, like on Mum_24V and on Mum_GND. The other two wires are not connected properly. Mum_A shows a connection dot, which is KiCad’s attempt to try to “fix” something which should not have to be fixed. The little green square on the Mum_B wire is KiCad’s way of communicating that a wire end is open and it does not recognize the connection at all.
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