Would like a new automatic annotation option in eeschema

[Ron Burkey]

In converting a large number of historical schematic diagrams (from the Apollo Project) into KiCad, I find that eeschema's annotation feature for hierarchical designs doesn't meet the naming pattern needed to accurately make these conversions. (The problem is that I can't arbitrarily use any naming pattern I want, because the schematics say right on them what the naming convention is supposed to be, and obviously there is associated textual documentation as well.) So I wonder if a new naming-style option could be implementated?

The idea is that you simply take the reference designator of the block in the parent schematic and append the reference designator from within the child block to it. For example, if the parent schematic contained two hierarchical blocks, designated (say) B1 and B2, and if the child block contained (say) resistors R1 and R2, then after annotation you'd have resistors B1R1, B1R2, B2R1, and B2R2.

Beyond my own schematic-conversion project, this naming convention has advantages over the current X100 or X1000 options, in that you can uniquely trace all reference designators down through a multi-level hierarchical design. Thus it may have uses beyond my own project. In fact, my first exposure to hierarchical schematics was back in the 1980's with a schematic editor called Omation Schema, and it used exactly this scheme back then.

[Ron Burkey (rburkey)]

While I think my original suggestion was a good one, I can see that if it ever is implemented KiCad, it will likely be far too late to be of any assistance in our project. In other words, we'd like to have it, but probably wouldn't end up being able to use it anyway. That being the case, I'd like to withdraw my suggestion. (I don't actually see any way to do that in the Launchpad user interface.)

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

In fact this is an alternate method to build a reference.
Some EDA tools uses this method. It is not bad.

Currently, an annoying issue is the fact we cannot set a sheet number for a given sheet in a hierarchy.
Setting a sheet number (and therefore be able to give a reference to a sheet) is a feature planned in V6