It’s very odd… Some parts will not let me rotate the part name by -90° or 180°.
Most footprints work correctly - pressing the ‘R’ key rotates the name through all 4 positions, but I have a connector that only rotates the name in two directions - 0° (so text has the baseline on the bottom), or 90° (so text has the baseline on the right side). Pressing ‘R’ simply flips between these two choices.
Any ideas?
Is this an official library symbol others can try?
I think so…
I need to get to my other computer and check. I’ll post back a bit later.
Footprint text items have “keep upright” property. With that checked, the text can be rotated only between the two rotation angles.
BTW, this is probaly a good option to have for PCBs. People like to have texts readable when they look at the board, and the texts need to be either horizontal or vertical but not upside down or downside up or whatever I should call the other wrong option where it’s rotated 90 degrees but so that you have to tilt your head in the wrong way compared to other rotated texts. 
Yes, that was the issue.
I’m not sure I agree with constraining the rotation, because - how does Kicad know what “up” is?
But, now I know where to check. It’s odd that the constraint came in with the footprint, and not the project.
Up or down is defined by the board. It’s always in one direction in the view (though the view can be flipped).
I don’t think it should be defined in the project. The two-rotation-only limitation should be the default – almost always the user wants to see the text in the right way in the design, regardless of the footprint, but only the footprint can “know” if some text should be rotated freely, because it really depends on the individual text item and its function.
Notice how this works in a design: when you rotate a footprint, the text which has this option checked, is always kept in the correct rotation for reading.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.