Text on schematic to be placed on the pcb

[alexpacini]

I was wondering if there is a specific symbol used to place text that should then be placed on a pcb layer.
At the moment I am placing a text note on the schematic that reminds me to place the text on the pcb, but it would be quite useful to have a dedicated symbol for that.
Is there anything like this?

[eelik]

Create a symbol without pins and attach a footprint to it which has text in the wanted layer.

[alexpacini]

Is the text fixed in the footprint? I would like it to auto inherit the text on the schematic.

[Rene_Poschl]

@alexpacini

I would like it to auto inherit the text on the schematic.

The value field can be misused for this. (Place the value field onto the silk layer of the footprint and fill it with whatever text you like in the schematic)
Possibly make the reference invisible as you will not care about it.

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There is however a catch. Any symbol that is connectable to a footprint will appear in your BOM. Text only footprints and symbols will not be easy to handle by kicad tools so you might want to have some drawing on the fab layer for the footprint and some graphics for the symbol side. (copy paste, delete, move, … will be near impossible if not impossible without this.)

[alexpacini]

Ok, I see.
Without an officially supported method I think it is best to remain in using annotations on the schematic and to copy them as text in the pcb.
Thanks a lot for your reply.

[John_Pateman]

There is a nice autotext script from @bobc that I have used previously. I believe that it still works on 5.1. It is primarily aimed at getting revisions, dates etc on the board but might be hacked for your needs.

Special Strings or Text on PCB

And you enter it only once - at the project level - and it automagically finds its way to the appropriate places in each of the tools. As you said, a great way to save time and avoid worry if you clone an existing project to create the next revision. Dale

[dchisholm]

Your thread actually raises two separate, but related, topics.

One is the idea of entering some bit of information - such as a part number, assembly name, company logo, revision level, copyright notice, etc - at ONE location (such as the top-level project file) and having the information programatically available in all other tools.

The second idea is the details of representing the information on a board. Will it appear on a copper layer, silkscreen, or some other layer? Will the characters appear as copper features (positive representation), or etched into the copper (negative)? What DRC constraints apply to the information’s representation? Will the information be searchable?

While I definitely see the usefulness of such features and would welcome their presence, I also see that they are far from trivial to implement.

Dale

[alexpacini]

@dchisholm

The second idea is the details of representing the information on a board. Will it appear on a copper layer, silkscreen, or some other layer? Will the characters appear as copper features (positive representation), or etched into the copper (negative)? What DRC constraints apply to the information’s representation? Will the information be searchable?

Well, the silkscreen would be enough for me, but I see your point.

I think that moving it to a different layer afterwards should not be too complicate (at worst I can change it into the text file… so I know when I am doing something not supported…)

[alexpacini]

This is actually very nice, I will look though it.