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Alternative symbols for easy rotation

autodeskguest

When placing a common library part such as a resistor or capacitor it's

often necessary to rotate it to fit in with how you are drawing a certain

part of your schematic. For any one device, library symbols can currently

only be drawn in a single rotational position so when you then rotate the

part your text is now no longer how you would like it and you are required

to smash the device and manually replace all the text in the right

positions and orientations. This is okay for a handful of components but

not good for a large design. It's fine for a hobbyist just throwing

together small projects for their own use but as a professional design

engineer, when I present clients with schematics I have drawn they need to

look professional and this is causing additional work to achieve this.

 

It would be nice if several versions of a symbol (up to 4) could be

provided which would automatically be cycled through upon rotate if they

were available. This would mean we could create nice sets of symbols in our

libraries and rotate away to our hearts content safe in the knowledge that

we wouldn't be building up a mountain of smash and reposition work down the

line.

 

A quick fix I tried for this was to have -H and -V variants of resistors,

capacitors etc but this just became a pain in the BOM! (pun intended!)

 

Many thanks,

 

Rachael

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  • Hi All,

     

    Since the last thread went completely off the rails, I'd like to respond to the original post.

     

    I routinely use smash and rotate, change font, change size, etc., on all the parts in a design until I have it looking professional.  Not because my readers are stupid, but because I'm a professional and I take pride in my work.  Our company has strict rules for the size of text, fonts, line weights, etc.  At the library level, we use a script to add standard name and value texts to layers; we don't bother trying to position them nicely because we always align them to the grid in the schematic when we finalize the schematic.

     

    Now, I WOULD like to cycle between alternate symbols for supporting DeMorgan equivalents because authoring schematics using positive logic conventions DRASTICALLY reduces logic errors and makes them much easier to verify.  If I have two active low signals and I want the active high output signal to be true when either input is true, the symbol would be an OR body with a bubble at each input and none on the output.  The implementation would be a NAND gate.  So a NAND gate would have two symbols, one with an AND body and a bubble at the output, another with an OR body and a bubble on each input.  Same gate, two different symbols.  I tried making a DeMorgan version of my logic library, but don't like the idea of maintaining each part in two libraries -- it's likely a change might be made to one and not the other.

     

    So while I agree that it would be nice to have different symbols (for whatever purpose), I wouldn't want those alternate symbols to necessarily be tied to the rotation.  But if someone else wanted to build their library that way, they certainly could; whatever mechanism selected the alternate symbol would have to be performed in addition to the rotation, but that would be less work than smashing and realigning text.

     

    Jay

  • in reply to Former Member

    Hi Jay,

     

    It seems like you have another perfectly valid use for this feature which is different from my use case :-)

     

    To answer your final point, it wouldn't necessarily be tied in any way to actual rotation, it could use the different symbol variants to cycle through symbols which were drawn at different rotations so no need for any involvement of the separate rotate command. It could maybe have an enhancement such that a flag set in the library part linked it to rotation which would then enable the schematic to be changed more easily in future if the orientation needed to be changed.

     

    I do believe that with this approach, the need for smash and reposition in your first paragraph could be significantly reduced with an appropriately designed library which matches your style guides, especially as the schematic must use a 0.1" grid so all other text can be placed at any alternative off grid locations within the library. It'll likely never be 100% and you'll still have to smash and tidy up some parts but I think a lot should just go down without needing any fettling.

     

    Best Regards,

     

    Rachael

Reply
  • in reply to Former Member

    Hi Jay,

     

    It seems like you have another perfectly valid use for this feature which is different from my use case :-)

     

    To answer your final point, it wouldn't necessarily be tied in any way to actual rotation, it could use the different symbol variants to cycle through symbols which were drawn at different rotations so no need for any involvement of the separate rotate command. It could maybe have an enhancement such that a flag set in the library part linked it to rotation which would then enable the schematic to be changed more easily in future if the orientation needed to be changed.

     

    I do believe that with this approach, the need for smash and reposition in your first paragraph could be significantly reduced with an appropriately designed library which matches your style guides, especially as the schematic must use a 0.1" grid so all other text can be placed at any alternative off grid locations within the library. It'll likely never be 100% and you'll still have to smash and tidy up some parts but I think a lot should just go down without needing any fettling.

     

    Best Regards,

     

    Rachael

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