Pin numbering order and distribution, just some opinions

[Rene_Poschl]

@LuC

I find it quite awkward, you know, I’ve always been counting floors in a building with positive numbers ground to top. The same is natural to me with cartesian axes.

But you write from top left to bottom left.
A spreadsheet also starts form top left and increments towards bottom right.

And all standards regarding schematic symbols suggest that ordering. IEC, IEEE, DIN, …
So this convention is quite widespread.

@LuC

With relevant and complex IC parts, let’s say over 20 pins, and physically arranged in two lines (like SOIC) or on four sides (like QFP, QFN, etc.), we kept distribution of schematic pins as in the physical package. That helped a lot verifying a board under test or a PCB routing with schematic.Any opinion on this?

There was a lengthy discussion about that recently. So you are definitely not alone in that.
However most complex schematics benefit greatly from organizing pins by functional groups. This is what is used by the official lib.

The reasoning behind that is that the schematic should in an understandable way communicate the function of a circuit. (This is made easier by organizing pins by function)

The schematic is not in any way intended to communicate the physical side of the circuit. (That’s what the board file is for.)

For debugging we will get cross highlighting between schematic and pcb_new in kicad 5. (Meaning you can highlight a signal in eeschema and have it also highlighted in pcb_new)