V5.0 symbol issues on Mac

[andrimar]

Hi all,

I just updated to Kicad 5 and had to update a symbol in one of my project libraries and after that the symbol in the schematic editor looks very different from the library editor(see attached picture)

Some more, and hopefully useful, information

• Orig. a 4.0.7 project updated to 5.0. Update process was very smooth.
• “Old” symbol displayed correctly(but had wrong pin type on one pin, hence the update)
• Tried removing the symbol from lib and restart kicad, followed by creating the symbol again, same display issue.

Anyone seen anything similar?

[Rene_Poschl]

Ähm where is the difference?

[bobc]

The difference is eeschema->Preferences->General Options->Editing->Automatically place symbol fields

[andrimar]

@Rene_Poschl: Note the different reference and value label placements. I did not manually move them.

@bobc: Yes that was it, thank you. Just out of curiosity, do you know the reasoning for turning this on by default in version 5?

[Rene_Poschl]

@andrimar

Yes that was it, thank you. Just out of curiosity, do you know the reasoning for turning this on by default in version 5?

Was always the default. Without this feature you would not be able to rotate or mirror a symbol. (Ok you could but it would look strange.)

[andrimar]

Hmm, did some more testing and while it may be true that the “Automatically place symbol fields” options has always been on by default it cannot explain the different behaviour that I’m seeing between library items saved with 4.0.7 and 5.0

The test I conducted was the following.

I have a library created with 4.0.7 initially that contains 2 symbols. One symbol remains untouched but the other is updated using the new lib editor in 5.0 and saved.

When I place the symbol created in 4.0.7, with “Automatically place symbol fields” ON it respects the value and reference field locations. When rotating the symbol the relative positioning is kept(i.e. they do not get translated to arbitrary locations within the symbol) and text gets mirrored correctly

When I place the symbol created in 4.0.7, with “Automatically place symbol fields” OFF the same behaviour is observed as in the previous test.

When I place the symbol created in 4.0.7 and updated in 5.0 with “Automatically place symbol fields” ON it does not respect the relative positioning of the value and reference fields(See picture in the original post). When rotating, the fields get moved and mirrored based on this new “relative positioning” so the fields are legible.

When I place the symbol created in 4.0.7 and updated in 5.0 with “Automatically place symbol fields” OFF I observe the same behaviour as with the symbol not touched by 5.0, described in the first two tests above.

Something weird is definitely going on.

Noticed this became a lot longer than intended, maybe it would help to create a small screen capture demonstrating the problem?

[bobc]

Yes, and perhaps you say highlight which behaviour is unexpected. You make a series of observations and then say it’s weird, but we don’t know what you are expecting to see.