Hi
I wanted to know if there is an autoposition command for the designators in the pcbs, because most of my components have the designators in the center, so it would be nice to be able to select all of them and position them above the component, or something similar,
thanks in advance!
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I do not know any EDA what is able to do a satisfying job in this area. The requirements are too diffrent. Some like to see the values and refdes and other only one of them or switch between. Some allow diffrent rotations for reading, other required same orientation or allow two orientations for landscape and portrait. At least the footprint rotation is responslible what is “above” in north direction. There might be another component at this location what requires manual move of the refdes. Anyway, there is a pretty good tool->GeographicalReannotation for renumbering Refdes in the PCB editor what later helps to find any refdes without computer on the paper print.
There is: Schematic Editor / Preferences / Preferences / Schematic Editor / Editing Options / Symbol Field Automatic Placement. But it is for the schematic only. There is no equivalent for the PCB editor. I agree with Janvi that it probably would not make much sense in the PCB Editor. Stuff gets moved too often and rotated to accommodate track layout for this to be very useful.
You can change text locations and orientation in the footprints themselves, but it does not seem very useful. I usually turn of or ignore the texts most of the time, and then every now and then do a cleanup pass to move and rotate silkscreen texts.
If you take some time to tweak your parts in the footprint editor your cleanup is much less. The below parts were just placed and not cleaned up. I like the value in the middle of the part for fab, and I make the fab outline open on the ends for longer part numbers. The position of the ref des on silk can also be put in approximately the spot you want. You can make clean up much easier.
With SMD parts, I often change silkscreen text height and width from the default 1.0 mm to 0.8 mm to stand a chance of fitting it.
It still prints nicely on the boards that I have had made.
Yeah the default is way too large. I use 0.64x0.64 with 0.15 thick lines on silk, and for fab 0.5x0.5x0.1 and sometime smaller as fab can be blown up for a detail note.
Fab is just display limits.
Silkscreen has very practical printing limits.
Do others agree that as fine as 0.64, 0.64 is ok with the cheap fabs these days?
Probably something that needs to be considered, it leaves me sore to not have this coming from altium…
It is actually useful, by the way, since you have a known and consistent position for every designator outside the component to tweak if needed, but i suppose its not much different from having it in the middle and just editing the text layer…
Oh well, still would be nice to have that ability.
There is a Python scripting interface in the PCB editor, and once you’ve figured out how it works, writing a script for this is probably just a handful of lines of code.
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