I have text in F silk. I used flip (f-key w/cursor on the text.). The text mirrored and was COPIED to B silk. This surprised me, but it did what I wanted. I did this for ~18 pieces of text. I then attempted to repeat this the on another part of the board. This time the text was MOVED to B silk.
I cannot figure out what is going on. Prior to being successful with the copy/mirror action I tried various things with block, copy, flip, and layer change, but found that the block flip appears to flip about a horizontal axis, so abandoned the block approach. Could these efforts have left the system in a strange state? Is there a standard way of putting identical text on both F and B silk in the proper orientation, i.e., text reading correct hand on both front and back of the board?
With 4.0.2 using c and f with the cursor on the text works. I did not know that the keyboard commands would stack. That got the job done. So the anomalous behaviour may remain a mystery.
4.0.2 is hopelessly outdated. At least update to 4.0.7 this has a lot of bugs fixed. (Which is also already outdated as v5 has already been released. But keeping an old v4 around might be a good idea to maintain old projects)
The only thing that I can think of is you may have duplicated that text once before and forgot. So when you selected it and flipped it you only flipped one copy. The other one that was hiding “behind” the one you flipped was now visible.
Your guess is correct, except that there were 3 copies! I expect that happened during my block move/copy/flip attempts. I see that when I R-click on the text the selection clarification lists three text items. All fixed now, and mystery solved. Operator error.
KiCad 4.0.7 is available for all actively developed ubuntu versions (oldest i can see is 14.04) via a ppa. (If you get security updates you can get kicad 4.0.7. If you can not get security update you need to update your operating system anyways.)