What's Good About Part Developer and Fonts? You Can Change Them in SPB16.3!

PCB Librarian Expert (sometimes known as Part Developer or PDV) is the librarian tool used for generating all the parts that are used in Allegro Design Entry HDL (DEHDL) and Allegro System Architect (ASA) based designs. These parts contain symbols which are placed on the schematic canvas and connected to capture the design logic. In the SPB16.3 release, with the availability of font support in DEHDL, this same font support is also provided in PCB Librarian Expert.

While generating parts in PCB Librarian Expert, the librarian can have the same fonts displayed on the symbol editor canvas and have the same look and feel of the symbols as on the DEHDL schematic canvas where these symbols would be placed. The font settings which are used by DEHDL are also utilized by PCB Librarian Expert to ensure this.

 

Font categories available in PCB Librarian Expert

Since the object categories in PCB Librarian Expert are a subset of the object categories in DEHDL, only a subset of these settings are used by PCB Librarian Expert. Fonts can be specified for the following categories of Text Objects:

• Symbol Text
• Symbol / Component / Instance Properties
• Ref Des and Section
• Pin Name
• Pin Text
• Pin Properties

All the font specific attributes are the same as that for DEHDL. They are read from the same START_FONT section from the project (cpm) file.

Note: Fonts cannot be set for individual objects.

Accessing Font Setup

In PCB Librarian Expert, Selecting Tools> Setup, and then Fonts on the left side tree, will present the Font Setup dialogue box:

 
The setup form in PCB Librarian Expert is the same as that in DEHDL with the exception that only those categories are listed which are available in PCB Librarian Expert.

 
Notice how you can select for the six (6) different categories - the Font, Size, Style (Regular, Italic, Bold Italic, Bold), Color (these are the same colors as available in DEHDL), and Effects (Regular or Underline). Also, when the Concept Font is selected, the Style and Effects are pre-set to Regular and cannot be changed.

You can add any new desired fonts. Simply copy the font file (e.g. Cadence Narrow.ttf) to the C:\Windows\Font folder. This will install the Cadence Narrow Font automatically on your windows machine and make it available in all the editors which provide font selection options, including PCB Librarian Expert.

Please share your experience with Part Developer font support using the SPB16.3 release.

Jerry "GenPart" Grzenia