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Hi guys,
I am currently doing a general update of all footprints in our company's vault. The idea is to improve them visually and make them consistent.
I have the idea to put designators on the the mechanical layer which is used for the assembly drawings (the same way it is done on the Rex board and some other boards from Fedevel). For that I will use special strings .Designator, which get replaced with proper designators in an actual PCB.
The problem is that I want the designator to be always perfectly centred inside the component outline. However, in Altium a text string has it's reference origin always placed at the bottom left corner. Because of that when the string text gets longer, the text box expands to the right and the actual centre of the box moves to the right as well. Hence, the centre of the string depends on it's current length. To get a better idea I attached a screenshot. You can see that single digit designators look ok, but double, triple etc. are not well centred any more. If the initial .Designator string is placed in such way, that the 3 digit designators will be centred well, then the opposite happens - one digit ones get shifted to the left because they are shorter.
The only way I found around this issue was to give the text box a constant size and to justify the text position inside, so that the text always stays centred inside the text box. I am not entirely happy with this though, since the text box should be big enough to hold the entire .Designator text string and since it is always a constant size, it stays as big even after the proper designators are replaced in the PCB. This leaves small components (like 0402, 0201 capacitors for example) with long text boxes sticking outside the component outline. This could be annoying with a busy layout. It increases the mess when you select a bunch of components and also makes it easy to unintentionally select a text box while clicking in the empty space around components.
Can you think of a nicer solution?
Thanks
I am currently doing a general update of all footprints in our company's vault. The idea is to improve them visually and make them consistent.
I have the idea to put designators on the the mechanical layer which is used for the assembly drawings (the same way it is done on the Rex board and some other boards from Fedevel). For that I will use special strings .Designator, which get replaced with proper designators in an actual PCB.
The problem is that I want the designator to be always perfectly centred inside the component outline. However, in Altium a text string has it's reference origin always placed at the bottom left corner. Because of that when the string text gets longer, the text box expands to the right and the actual centre of the box moves to the right as well. Hence, the centre of the string depends on it's current length. To get a better idea I attached a screenshot. You can see that single digit designators look ok, but double, triple etc. are not well centred any more. If the initial .Designator string is placed in such way, that the 3 digit designators will be centred well, then the opposite happens - one digit ones get shifted to the left because they are shorter.
The only way I found around this issue was to give the text box a constant size and to justify the text position inside, so that the text always stays centred inside the text box. I am not entirely happy with this though, since the text box should be big enough to hold the entire .Designator text string and since it is always a constant size, it stays as big even after the proper designators are replaced in the PCB. This leaves small components (like 0402, 0201 capacitors for example) with long text boxes sticking outside the component outline. This could be annoying with a busy layout. It increases the mess when you select a bunch of components and also makes it easy to unintentionally select a text box while clicking in the empty space around components.
Can you think of a nicer solution?
Thanks
I also want this! 
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