Symbol Text Position

[Robert1]

I’ve run into a situation where KiCAD is arbitrarily moving symbol text. I suspect it’s trying to be helpful but the result is the reverse. I’ve defined a revision symbol to annotate revision changes.

The ## is a newly defined field that will contain the revision indicator. It’s centre aligned so it should fit in the outline nicely when it is set. However, when this symbol is placed KiCAD both moves the field outside of the outline and changes it to left alignment

I see no setting that would prevent KiCAD from doing this destruction. I can obviously change this on each placement but that is work that should not be necessary. Perhaps there is some predefined symbol for this use I haven’t found or some setting that prevents symbol text from being moved (I can think of other circumstances where this is a less than desired thing)

Application: KiCad Symbol Editor (64-bit)

Version: (6.0.10), release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.1
libcurl/7.86.0-DEV Schannel zlib/1.2.13

Platform: Windows 10 (build 19045), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW

Build Info:
Date: Dec 19 2022 21:23:04
wxWidgets: 3.2.1 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.80.0
OCC: 7.6.2
Curl: 7.86.0-DEV
ngspice: 38
Compiler: Visual C++ 1929 without C++ ABI

Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON

[scandey]

I’m afraid I no longer have v6 (that version is approximately a year old now), but in v7 the settings that control this behavior is Preferences > Schematic Editor > Editing Options > Symbol Field Automatic Placement. I suspect (though not sure) that the settings are similar in v6.

[craftyjon]

Update to V7, and then edit the properties for that field to disallow autoplacement (in the symbol editor)

This will turn it off for just that one field instead of globally as in @scandey’s approach.

[Robert1]

Good to know that the capability is there when the time to upgrade comes (It never the time to do it in the middle of a project)

[paulvdh]

I always turn off autoplacement completely in the preferences, and that setting was already available in KiCad V6.