In a footprint, the silkscreen reference designator text is moveable in the PCB Editor. How do I create another instance of “moveable” (unlocked) property text, such as for the Pin1 reference dot, so on a tight board I can nudge it on an individual component basis, when the dot is over the edge or within a copper polygon or buried under another component?
Every simple textitem should be later moveable in the board-editor.
Is a dot a text item?
How do you make a dot a text item?
Is a dot a text item?
Normally not.
I draw a dot normally as circle with 0,1mm radius and 0.3mm line thickness. These dots are fixed and not moveable in the board-editor.
How do you make a dot a text item?
For this task the truetype-fonts could be utilized. On windows the font “symbol” contains a dot-character. (not tested, I don’t use the fonts as I fear that this impacts compatibility between different development-systems.)
I use the ASCII bullet point ( • ) for such things, due to its simple hotkey and its existence in most fonts.
Windows: Alt+NumPad7
macOS: Alt+8
Sadly, in the kicad default font bullet point [below: left] is one of the most ham-fisted circles I’ve seen, whereas a standard font like Arial [below: right] has no issue drawing the bullet point as a perfect circle:
I bet you won’t see the difference in the physical board unless you use a very expensive manufacturer.
You’re [probably] correct; even as a very very low priority — would it be admissable to request change to the kicad font ‘bullet point’ from octagon to circle?
I just took a round dot / period and enlarged them to a size of 10mm in a few random fonts. It took me 5 tries to get a font with a round dot.
(Note, 10mm is the “text size”, not the dot size). The screenshot below is from those dots, compared with an 0805 SMT resistor.
The leftmost dot is from KiCad’s default font.
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