Implement more (and custom?) annotation schemes

[Michael Kavanagh]

Allow annotations without a number:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1660134

Support for sheet.component reference numbering
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1728269

Would like a new automatic annotation option in eeschema
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1786645

eeschema: wish: schematic with many sheets: more adjustable annotation
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1800726

eeschema: store value of "use first free number after" in every schematic sheet
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1785616

[Ron Burkey (rburkey)]

In lieu of having the particular annotation scheme I wanted within eeschema itself, I ended up writing a standalone program in Python that read the .sch files and applied my annotation scheme to them. I did that out of personal necessity, but it occurs to me that it might be a more-appropriate approach than trying to implement a bunch of different annotation schemes directly within eeschema that were each of use to only a few people.

The way it could work is that the program itself would be completely generic except that there would be a single function in it that supplied an annotation for a given component, on the basis of inputs like a sheet number, a base reference designator, and so on, and that the user could replace the contents of this function to create whatever annotation rule he/she happened to like.

Just a thought.

[Ron Burkey (rburkey)]

I suppose I should actually have given a link to my own Python program in my last post. Although it works for me, I'm sure it's probably completely worthless to anybody else, and doesn't even have the user-replaceable function in it that I proposed, but it might give some focus regarding my suggestion for a standalone annotating program.

My own program assumes the eeschema has _already_ annotated the design (although it doesn't care what rule eeschema used when it did so) and it corrects those annotations according to its own ideas.

(The basic idea of my specific program is that sheet names in the parent drawing are things like "1", "2", "3", and so on, while the components in child blocks all have fields with the name "baseRefd" and values like "R1", "C3", "Q12", etc., and that the particular rule for forming the annotations in the child hierarchical blocks is to prefix the sheet name to the baseRefd to get reference designators like "1R1", "2C3", and so on. And there are a few special cases that alter the numbering somewhat.)

https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc/blob/schematics/Scripts/blockAnnotater.py

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2403