Copy Silkscreen elements from front of board to back of board

Layout
1

Continuing the discussion from Change layer of multiple selected items in footprint editor:

It seems that as of 2018 that KiCad doesn’t support doing this, but there’s been a LOT of improvements in KiCad since then, it seems. I just want to confirm, before I do a lot of manual re-creation of my front silkscreen on the backside of my board, that there is still no support for copying and mirroring my text and graphic elements from the front silk layer to the back silk layer.

Thanks again!

2

Have you tried? I selected a logo on B.Silk and edited its Properties, selecting Front instead of Back and it was done. You would move it from Front to Back of course.

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I just did a simple test:

  1. Set the selection filter in the lower right corner to only select text items and graphic items.
  2. Draw a selection box around two footprints (only the RefDes gets selected, not graphics on F.Silkscreen).
  3. [Ctrl + C] to copy.
  4. [Ctrl + V] to paste.
  5. f to flip.
  6. [Enter] to finalize it.

The end result is that the RefDes of both footprints have been copied and put on the back side of the PCB. The Silkscreen lines which were part of the footprints have not been copied. The texts have also been changed from the RefDes( which is always connected to the footprint) to regular text.

Normal texts and graphics objects can also be copied and pasted in the regular way. With PCB Editor / View / Show Properties manager you can also change the layer of a selection.

Another option is to:

  1. Export all footprints to a custom (project specific) library.
  2. Update the project so both PCB and Schematic refer to the newly created library.
  3. Add graphics and text to the footprints in that library.
  4. Update the footprints on the PCB with the changes in your library.

The advantage of this method is you have to make the changes only once for each footprint type.

If you have something else in mind, then tell us more about the end goal you want to achieve. Maybe we can give some more detailed advice then.

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4

Plaing “Flip” from context menu mirrors the items. If you do this for items in F.* layer, they are also moved to the corresponding B.* layer. This alone should solve your case.

In 8.0.0-RC1 (release candidate before the final v8) there is the Property panel in the footprint editor. In v7 this is only in the PCB editor. This solves the more general case of changing the layer of several selected items at once. If you need to mirror the items afterwards you have to use the context menu → Mirror.

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Thank you all! So, I tried all of your suggestions, and the magic code that I was missing was the

" f to flip."

This is THE thing that I had no idea how to find or do, and it’s the one thing that I WASN’T donig.

Is there a menu equivalent to this f to flip.? Browsing the menus, I didn’t see it, but many of these menus still make my head spin to a certain degree…

Thanks again everyone!!!

6

Properties, exchange Front with Back. It may be possible to do a group selection at once.

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7

Right Mouse click on anything; then, from the select menu, sixth item down. The next one up from properties.

8

You must have missed it in:

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