Eeschema field auto-placement improvements

[Evan Shultz]

The KiCad nightlies are auto-placing symbol text when the symbol is instantiated on the schematic canvas. The library team has found issues with this behavior. Please see https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library/issues/848#issuecomment-293106272 for examples and discussion.

I haven't tried any of these examples myself, but it seems unpleasant if the auto-placed symbol text is in a location which is unsuitable due to pin locations and requires manual clean-up.

Since I'm just a messenger, please post in the aforementioned thread or contact the posters there individually.

[John Pateman (gasman2016)]

The KLC proposes that power pins are placed at the top and bottom of schematic components. When the library item is imported into eeschema,the RefDes and Value field are moved from the location set in the library and are autoplaced above and centred over the component.

This means that the RefDes and Value need to be moved in order to connect the component.

Not clear why the RefDes and Value are being moved at all as (presumably) they are in a suitable position in the library to start with.

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

Wouldn't it be easier to just disable the autoplace feature and accept the default field positions? I'm not sure changing the autoplace routine is necessary. It doesn't always get it exactly right but overall it does a pretty good job.

[Rene Poeschl (poeschlr)]

For single unit symbols the auto place algorithm is not needed. (As long as the symbol is not rotated.)
But for multi unit symbols (with differently sized units) it is needed because one can not define the text field positions for each unit separately.

[Rene Poeschl (poeschlr)]

Related: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1841523

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2060