Turning visibility of fields on and off across whole schematic

[Elgar]

Sometimes I would like to see footprint, catalogue number fields etc. on the schematic, but a company requirement is to hide such details on some versions of the schematic to reduce clutter.

Is there a simple way to do this?

‘Edit->Update fields from library’ presumably requires the visibility to be changed in the library, so this is no good…?

I had high hopes for ‘Tools->Edit Symbol Fields’ but that doesn’t seem to change the visibility of the fields even if I deselect them and then ‘Apply, save schematic and continue’. Is this a bug or the expected behaviour?

I’m using version (5.1.2)-2 64-bit on Windows 7.

(thanks for a great piece of software, whatever)

[qu1ck]

@Elgar

I had high hopes for ‘Tools->Edit Symbol Fields’ but that doesn’t seem to change the visibility of the fields even if I deselect them and then ‘Apply, save schematic and continue’. Is this a bug or the expected behaviour?

Those checkboxes control visibility of fields/columns in the table, not in schematic. So it’s working as intended.

I don’t know of a way to easily toggle visibility of fields in schematic. In v6 with python scripting it should be possible but not right now.

[paulvdh]

There used to be a menu item or shorcut key to make all invisible symbol fields visible on the schematic. It was however years ago since I last saw that option, and am not sure if it still exists in KiCad.

I did a few minutes of combing though the manual, shortucts key list and even a bit on Internet, but It did not turn up how to do that as an option in KiCad.
It does turn up lots of other ways, such as:
direct text manipulation in a text editor. (Vim & regular expressions):
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/57725/footprint-field-visibility-options-in-eeschema-kicad
or a 70 liner C program:
http://blog.zazolabs.com/kicad-change-fields-visibility-utility/

The setting in KiCad also was a “all or nothing” setting, which cluttered the schematic to such an extreme point that it’s usability was questionable.
For example, all the long datasheet links and long footprint links.

qu1ck noted python scripting.
Currently Eeschema has no integrated scripting capability, but you can of course use scripts directly on the schematic files, like the C example above.

You can probably use existing libraries to read the schematic into Python, or you can simply start from the description of the KiCad File format, load the schematic as text and manipulate it that way.

If you have a bit of knowledge of Python, such a thing should be doable in a day of work or less.