I am creating a symbol for a 80-pin IC by editing a symbol of a similar 100-pin part in the same family. This was convenient because many of the pin names are the same, and only the pin numbers are different. Once I sorted out the symbol names and new positions in the symbol editor, I needed to renumber the pins.
Opened up the pin table, and I’m trying to get the rows in the correct sequence so I can quickly renumber them. I thought this would be easy because I could just sort by X then Y, or Y then X. However, this doesn’t work. The best I can figure from experimenting, When you sort by X (or Y), it completely forgets the order of previous searches. And the sort order of other coordinate is not sequential – it seems random, but I think it might be the order that the pin was placed on the original symbol.
There is no function to open a pin table for a subset of pins, which would solve my problem. In the PCB footprint editor, there is a function to re-sequence pin numbers by clicking on pins in order, but this doesn’t seem to be available in the symbol editor.
Finally, a minor thing I don’t see in the pin table, there is no way to fill a selected range of pins with a sequence (like you might do in a spreadsheet column, for example). In my case, renumbering 20 pins at a time, it’s no big deal to just type the numbers rapidly in sequence. But when I see users editing symbols with hundreds of pins, a fill sequence capability would be more helpful for those folks.
Am I missing something that would help me here? In the meantime, I just copied these groups of pins, 20 at a time, to a temporary empty symbol. There I could sort the pin table as expected and renumber them in the table. I could have also just lined all 80 pins at the same X coordinate, in hindsight.