Invisible symbols in schematic put footprints on my pcb

For me the schematic symbols also show up at Schematic Editor / Tools / Edit Symbol Fields, and they also show up in a generated BOM.

I added some fields to your symbols before generating the BOM, and these also do show up in the BOM.

I’ve been trying to do something with it from within the Schematic Editor, but to no avail.

First there is apparently a bug that got your schematic in this state in the first place, but equally serious is that it can not be cleaned up from within the GUI.

I also added an opamp, just to have something to look at on the white screen, and I could not even use the annotation tool at that point.

I also tried things like making invisible fields visible, and updating library links to other schematic symbols in the hope of making anything visible on screen, but it all failed.

I also could not find any way to select and delete them from for example Schematic Editor / Tools / Edit Symbol Fields.

I do not know what the Schematic Editor / Tools / Rescue Symbols is supposed to do in KiCad-nightly V5.99.

In the end it boils down to it that if you can’t select it on the canvas, then you can not edit or delete it.

To me it looks worthy of a bug report.

Thanks. I have not had anything like this happen again, and if I cannot reproduce it then perhaps it cannot reasonably be reported as a bug. I think I have updated my KiCad version once or twice since reporting the bug. I am now using this version:

Application: KiCad (64-bit)

Version: (5.99.0-12088-gff9612b6da), release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.1.5
libcurl/7.74.0-DEV Schannel zlib/1.2.11

Platform: Windows 10 (build 19043), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW

Build Info:
Date: Aug 26 2021 20:58:53
wxWidgets: 3.1.5 (wchar_t,STL containers)
Boost: 1.76.0
OCC: 7.5.0
Curl: 7.74.0-DEV
ngspice: 34
Compiler: Visual C++ 1928 without C++ ABI

Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON

Look at what I found:

I’ve been looking a bit at the schematic in a text editor.

The stroke width and colors of “0” that John Pateman found look like red herrings. It may be used for defaults, or whatever. I also saw these in other schematic files.

I discovered that some coordinates had pretty big numbers and did a search & replace in a text editor, and the block shown above re-appeared.

Can you recall any block move, rotate or copy/paste operation you may have done on that schematic part?

I made a bug report for it. If you can recall any additional information, then add it to:

[Edit] … Only now I see that you already found the big coordinates starting with 117… yourself.

Hi, Paulvdh

Thanks for opening the bug report.

I will be completely serious in saying that this issue arose a couple of months ago, and I typically forget what I did a couple of weeks ago. I do not remember doing anything weird, but perhaps (not doing anything weird) goes against my religion. :slight_smile:

Every now and then my mouse cursor does something weird.
I’ve had this for all my life, both on DOS, windoze, and now Linux and with different mice.

Usually it is a broken wire right at the point where the tail leaves the mouse, as that part gets bend the most. (Solution is then shorening the cable by a few cm).

Other times it seems to be a software thing. Maybe some mouse message getting parsed wrongly or an error in passing it through the software stack.

Something like that may be the cause of a “block move” receiving bogus coordinates, and it may be completely outside of KiCad.

Does your mouse cursor ever behave in such a way that it makes a n unexpected jump to some random position on your monitor?

But even then. The second bug is still valid, and a part of the reason I reported it. The parts should always be kept within the visible area where they can be selected and manipulated.

No, I do not get any such. I am wondering whether maybe I had tried mirroring a group of parts and some disappeared? I am trying that now and get no bad behavior. I might be confusing a couple of different past experiences.

Well found @paulvdh!

So @iabarrys’ wild guess proved correct: wayyyy beyond Saturn.

I’m curious to know how Paul measured the 11 metres beyond the page? :slightly_smiling_face:

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I wonder if it is possible to trigger a (minor warning) dialog box if a symbol lies outside of the sheet boundary? I say “minor” because I might temporarily park a symbol outside of the sheet while I am editing. I would not want the situation to disable normal editing. But perhaps the dialog box could provide an easy way to pull the wayward symbol(s) back inside the sheet boundary.

Pauls’ report on Gitlab refers to a “sanity check” regarding stuff off screen, amongst the other problems. Worth reading.

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It’s simple, I just looked at the schematic file in a text editor, and found numbers like below, (wich BobZ also posted earlier in this thread)

It did take me a while though to realize that the new format is in millimeters, and that puts: 11714.84mm way off screen. Then I tested it by replacing the “117” with “2” which shifted those schematic symbols and their connecting wires to approx. the middle of the sheet.

Not outside of the “sheet boundary”, but it should simply not be possible to use coordinates outside of the “draw-able area”. This is still a bit of a vague concept in KiCad. The area which can be drawn upon is dependent on zoom factor. Just try this:

  1. Zoom out a lot.
  2. Do a box select and move something very far from the center.
  3. Now (try to) zoom in on that moved part.
    If it’s too far from the center, then you can’t zoom in on it.

I also use the area around the “paper size” for (more or less) temporarily saving schematic parts. It’s not uncommon if I park 10+ different “blocks” there. I use it as a sort of multi buffer clipboard.

My strange sense of humor envisaged seeing a certain person crawling across the room, out the door, and into the garden, measuring the distance from the monitor to the recalcitrant chip with a 300mm rule. :grinning:

I just tried drawing a hierarchical sheet box about as large as possible:

(sheet (at -25749.25 -12247.88) (size 52010.31 24867.87)

That’s the area which can be reached from the UI. I agree it shouldn’t be possible to place items outside that area. It’s of course difficult because a box can be placed in < max X Y and it’s still outside the area. This means that no part of the bounding box of an item should be outside the view area.

A hackish solution would be to add an ERC check, even though this isn’t about electric rules at all.

What can be reached is dependent on zoom factor.
To demonstrate this, I made a little example. ( In V5.1.10)
202109-21_adsf_resistor_row.zip (8.1 KB)

The schematic just has a single row of resistors:

On the zoom level below, you can’t pan beyond R89:

Zooming in further, I can’t get beyond R79:


R79 is not very far out form the sheet border, and I’ve bumped into this limitation a few times while using the outside area as a “clipboard”.

[Edit] Apparently, when zooming the center of the screen does not go beyond R77/R78.

Also opened the project in KiCad-nightly V5.99, when zooming in I can get up to around R122, but it also varies a bit with the size of the schematic editor on the monitor.
It’s a bit of a weird limitation.

I can see the garden. I will have to try that. You might have an alternative solution.

This has gone “higher up” than I would have expected.
Both JP Charras and Wayne Stambaugh have commented on the issue on gitlab.

I don’t know if you monitor gitlab, but maybe you have something to add to:

Thanks, paulvdh

I have added my comment to the bug at Gitlab.

FWIW: Crazy as I may seem at times, I would like to think that if I knew what steps of mine had triggered the unreasonable symbol coordinates, I would have included that information once I figured that out.

I understand that you can’t recall details and I would not even expect that. I would not know them myself either.

But you probably do know more about the origin of the project. Things like if you copied stuff from another project or schematic or did some import.

I think you made most symbols yourself. Apparently they come from Bobs_Library_Something… They are definitely not standard. The transistor has no circle (all std. transistors do) and your resistor looks very similar to R_Small_US, but the zig-zag line is slightly different.

I edited my remarks about the symbols being my own, and also I think the schematic was a copy (with most parts deleted) of one which was covered by NDA.

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