How do I resize components?

Hello

I’m a total Kicad newbie and I’ve stumbled into my first roadblock. The generic Triac component seems to be disproportionately large, but I cannot find any resize tool in the schematic window.

Take a look: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1rSHSpIdbJdQVZoWUwwYjdsdUE/view

I have placed a transistor below it as a size comparison. If you can see a tiny cyan speck above the triac symbol to the left, that is supposed to be the designator! So there’s clearly something wrong with this component’s sizing.

What should I do?

Hi, Tobia.

In your schematic, right-click on the designator for your triac and select ‘Edit Reference’ from the popup menu. Then adjust the value in the size field of the popup window until the designator is big enough.

So I looked at his example image and the Triac looks overly large compared to the other components.
It appears that who ever drew the Triac used a large grid size.

Is it not possible to increase/decrease the size of a given schematic element (other than adjusting the text size of a given label)?

If Tobia makes the label bigger to match the Triac then the Triac will still look out of proportion to the other schematic elements.

Is that an issue where different people (or even the same person at different times) uses different base grid sizes when drawing schematic elements that will later be shared and mixed with other components drawn in a different grid size??

It would be nice if one could shrink/enlarge a schematic element as needed, OR if kicad would use a fixed grid size when creating schematic elements (but I don’t think that would work as the user could just draw a resistor very large or very small) I think we really need the ability to scale a given schematic element up or down as needed.

I don’t think this is as much of an issue when dealing with footprints as a footprint is tied to the physical size of the component it fits.

dwight