Today I made some mistakes and I am experiencing a minor inconvenience .
Mistake #1
Instead of manually copying the content from one schematic sheet to a different schematic sheet in a different project (which does not copy the annonations, the reason I am doing it like this) I used the option āinsert schematic sheet contentā unfortunately that does retain annonations (I am aware that this is a deliberate feature). And now my relative small board has these huge numbers.
Mistake #2 I did not redo the annonations before I placed the footprints.
I would like to re-annonate this one sheet without losing the net list links to the already placed footprints. These mere 11 components can be done manually, but is there a way to do let KiCad do this for me?
I do have learned that in the future I might as well use the insert schematic sheet content option and than re-annonate that sheet.
Select the area of the schematic you want to reannotate. Tools > Annotate Schematic and enable Selected, Reset Annotations and enter the start number you want. However the numbers may need manual tweaking if they donāt quite suit. 11 isnāt too many to do manually.
Update PCB from Schematic and the annotations should propagate to the PCB with the default matching by unique ID.
Edit: The selection is a powerful general feature. Besides the operations available from the context menu (right click), check other operations to see if they support Selection as the operand.
It was default behavior in V5.
I have little experience with V6 but whenever I update pcb from schematic the default is to use references and not unique ID. To use ID I have to uncheck one checkbox.
There is also a tool named Geographical Reannotate in the layout editor which can be used together with Update Schematic from PCB for exactly this purpose. Both can be found under Tools.
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