Hi All,
New to Eagle but learning reasonably well. I have a rather crowded PCB I'm laying out and currently it looks like a real mess because when I move the components as I need them to fit the labels such as Name and Value are all running on top of each other and also they are just way too big.
When in the board editor how do I change the position of the labels and values and their size?
Thanks in advance!
On 2014-11-11 16:12:38 +0000, Mark Holbrook said:
When in the board editor how do I change the position of the labels and
values and their size?
There's probably a script to do this but I'm not aware of it.
You use smash to allow the part name/value to be moved independently of
the part itself. Smash also allows you to size (or outright delete) the
name and/or value of a component as well.
What I generally do is to completely ignore the name and value when
laying out and positioning. I do this by turning off the layers. "dis
-tnames -tvalues -bnames -bvalues" does this for components on both the
top and bottom of the board.
When I am happy with the layout, I save my work (I keep my files in
git, so I make sure I've committed my changes to the repo) and then get
on with the business of making the silk screen layers look better.
dis -1 -16 turns off the top and bottom layers (so I see no traces).
dis torigins borigins makes sure that I can select the components on
both the top and bottom layers.
Then I group ALL of the components and smash the group
Now I turn OFF the top and bottom origins, and turn ON the tnames and
bnames layers (I never place component values on the silk, but you can
enable those layers as well if you like:
dis -torigins -borigins tnames bnames
You'll notice that there are little part origin markers 
by every
bit of part text, but not on the components themselves. I like this
because I can't accidentally move a component when moving the text
around.
Now I group all the component texts and change their size and ratio so
it's uniform. "ch siz 40mil", right-clicking the entire group and and
"ch ratio 15" and right-clicking the entire group again. The board
manufacturer I use (hackvana) can handle 4mil wide silkscreen lines, so
by changing the height of all of the text to 40mil and then a ratio of
15% I get 40 * .15 or 6mil wide silk lines, which gives me a nice
silkscreen font and size.
I usually do one layer at a time (top followed by bottom) so I turn OFF
the layer I'm not interested in but turn on the appropriate stop mask
layer so I can see where I can't place text. I turn on the appropriate
"place" layer as well since this is the graphics (part outlines, etc.)
that will be on the silkscreen layer.
dis tnames tplace tstop -bnames -bplace -bstop
Much placement and fiddling around ensues, but I end up with nicely
placed text. Turn on the various layers in various combinations and
tweak/fiddle with things until I'm satisified, then generate gerbers,
zip them up and throw them at gerblook.org to see what the board might
look like.
It's an iterative process, but it works nicely.
-A.
