Sideways pin names on vertical schematic-symbol pins

[Ron Burkey]

When you create a schematic part having some pins which are pointed upward or downward, those pin names are printed at 90-degree angles rather than in the their usual upright orientations. (I am using KiCad 6.0.0-rc1.) See the attached screenshot.

That behavior makes sense, I'm sure, in many use cases. In my particular application, though, I am converting historical schematics into KiCad for public presentation, and trying to reproduce the appearance of the original drawings as closely as is feasible. These historical drawings do not display the pin names sideways as KiCad does, and therefore I would prefer to have the option to display the pin names in an upright orientation.

It would be helpful if the same behavior were available for the pin names as for the reference designators: i.e., if there were an option in the symbol-library editor to define the orientations of the pin names on a pin-by-pin basis. Or, alternatively, if in eeschema itself, it were possible to move and rotate the individual pin names after the component had been placed on the schematic. (Though for my purposes, doing it in the symbol-library editor would be better.)

[Bob Cousins (bobcousins42)]

You can place text fields in the symbol editor with horizontal/vertical orientation.

[Ron Burkey (rburkey)]

On 08/07/2018 11:23 PM, Bob Cousins wrote:
> ** Attachment added: "Capture.PNG"
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1785941/+attachment/5172828/+files/Capture.PNG
>
You're right, that already does what I need to do, thanks!

[Ron Burkey (rburkey)]

It turns out that the the workaround of using simple text for the pin names, rather than displaying the pin names themselves, works only for some cases of interest, and not for all of them.

The case of special interest to me right now is that it doesn't work for multi-part symbols. On a multi-part symbol, the same text appears on all of the parts, so it can't be used for displaying pin names or numbers.

It also does not work if you have to rotate the symbol by 90 degrees when you place it on the schematic, since all of the text is rotated as well.

It occurs to me, though, that my original request (i.e., of being able to set the orientation of each pin name individually) was actually far more complex and probably harder to implement than what I actually need.

All I *really* need is just a new option in the symbol properties for "Show pins names upright", similar to the way there's already a "Show pin names inside". So it would work for all of the pin names in a symbol at once.

[Maciej Suminski (orsonmmz)]

I realize you are asking for something else, but you should be able to edit properties of a symbol text field and toggle its "Common to all units" property.

[Ron Burkey (rburkey)]

On 08/14/2018 08:56 AM, Maciej Suminski wrote:
> I realize you are asking for something else, but you should be able to
> edit properties of a symbol text field and toggle its "Common to all
> units" property.
>
I didn't realize I could do that, and you're right, it /can/ be used as
a workaround for my multipart issue.

Thanks for the info!

[eelik (eelik)]

Another user asked for this in the forum: https://forum.kicad.info/t/rotate-pin-number-and-pin-description/17990. Maybe this could be considered for the new file format?

[Johannes (jos+)]

As per Wayne this horizontal text on vertical pins featur is already part of the new file format.

[Sergey Suloev (ssuloev)]

It's just ridiculous that someone is seriously discussing if name and number rotation is required or not.. Common, this is just a BASIC editor functionality, this is must be in kicad.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2202