I ran into an odd behavior I had never seen before.
I created a few labels for my “wires” on a schematic. At one point I decided to reuse the labels by converting them into text. The labels did convert to text as expected (Clicking on “Edit” brings up a Text Properties box). However, the text still has the little box/anchor on the lower edge of it like a label does. I can rotate the text and the box will move to the opposite end of the label as it goes around.
I tried converting it to both Global Label and Hierarchical Label then back to text but the box/anchor is still there. If I create text without converting it from another format the anchor is not there.
Labels and Text are totally different things, text is just a comment on the schematic sheet and takes no part in the netlist. Labels actually assign names to nets.
What are you trying to do?
As I stated in my original posting, I had created some labels that I had “attached” to wires. When I deleted those wires I decided to re-use 2 of those labels as comments/text in other places on the schematic. Rather than use the text tool I decided to use the convert to text function (right-click popup “Change to”) to convert the label to text. That’s when I noticed the labels had changed to text but they still had the little anchor boxes (to “attach” them to the wire?) on the lower edge like labels normally do. I’d never seen that before.
To check that something in KiCad hadn’t changed that now made text behave more like labels for some reason, I created text using the text tool. This text did not have the little anchor boxes on the lower edge of the characters like the text did when I converted the labels to text.
Simply put, I was converting labels to text/comments as the program allows, but the conversion wasn’t executing like I believe it should.
The text goes black as expected but the square connection point never appears.
Hovering over the new label, I press M to move it and the cursor snaps to the lower left and the connection point appears. (The connection square not initially showing might be an indication of a refresh issue?).
After placing the label back down the label finally looks as expected.
Again using the RMB menu to convert, this time back to a text. The color goes to “text blue” of both the text and the square connection point.
Moving or editing the text doesn’t remove the connection point. Converting to any of the other types of labels and back to text doesn’t get rid of the square connection point. Even running ERC doesn’t clean the square connection point from the text. I put the square connection dot on a wire while it was text and it didn’t disappear as if an electrical connection was made, so I didn’t bother to create a netlist to see if the text was acting like a label. My guess is it isn’t acting like a label, but there is something that isn’t updated to remove the square glyph from the anchor point.
(Just out of chuckles, I did try with a multi-line text and the convert option in the RMB menu didn’t even show.)
Note, however, I did also find another potential issue. The text that I used has spaces, however one is prevented from using spaces when creating labels. Trying to convert a text with spaces should have probably thrown an error.
@svniceguy What say you report the bug about the connection square (reference this thread on the bug tracker for the devs to follow up) since you found it. I’ll report the “space in a label” issue since I found that one.
You can see from my screenshot of the menu (up in my first post of this thread) that the change type menu sub-items (at least the first) don’t show hotkey equivalents. I also didn’t know about this feature until the OP posted with his issue. For all I know it was either introduced with 5.1.x or has existed since before v3…
BTW, if you use Windows (though, I think I remember from past posts of yours that you don’t, so I guess this advice is for others… but I could be mistaken) the Greenshot screenshot program will allow you to take screenshots of menus. (My only association with Greenshot is only is a satisfied user.)
Wow!! And all I wanted to do was to point out something/possible issue that I hadn’t seen before…changing to text was a problem in this most current version (btw - I am also running Win10x64 5.1.2-1 x64). This thread seems to have taken off in a new direction.
wrt - the mouse right-click for “Change type…” I’ve been using KiCad on and off for quite some time (a few years) and have used this function occasionally since I’ve been pretty much using KiCad. Cannot comment about the hotkey support for this, since I’ve never used it that way.
