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How to highlight a net (and make the rest darker)

thomasli

Hi

Coming from the Altium world there is one thing I really miss in Allegro / Orcad PCB Designer: the ability to simply highlight a net by reducing the brightness of everything else. In Altium, there is a possibility to simply Ctrl-Click a net, everything else will go darker and the net will show more vivid. This way you can easily determine where the net is going, through all layers.

In Allegro/Orcad PCB Designer I have found the option to "highlight" a net which will make it a bit patterned, the rest will stay the same and it is really hard to distinguish it from the rest visible. I have found that you can give colors to a net which is slightly better but then I won't be able to determine the layers it is going through anymore. Also, the rest will still be bright, again - pretty hard to visually distinguish.

Any ideas?

  • steve

    Try enabling the Shadow Mode, go to Setup - Colors and Display Tab to set the Dim level then click on this icon before you invoke the highlight command.

  • redwire

    To get rid of the annoying bit-patterned highlight and make it solid and bright, go into User_Setup->Display->Highlight and select "display_nohiltefont".
    The other trick for display contrast is as per steve's post.

  • thomasli
    in reply to steve

    Thanks, that makes it a bit better but I'd like to see the whole net to be highlighted, not just the tracks on the layer where I selected the Cline segment, including all involved Vias, CLines, Pads so you can easily see where the signal is going. Currently it will stop at the first via - is there an option for that?

    Ok, just saw that I can do this using "Right Click -> SelectionSet -> Select -> Net", Then select highlight. Can this be bound to some key?

  • thomasli
    in reply to redwire

    Thanks, that definitely helps. It's interesting that sometimes I have a dialog popping up where I can actually select "No pattern" but the dialog on the Options panel only shows patterns without the "No pattern"

  • steve
    in reply to thomasli

    You can drive what gets selected by the Find Pane, turn on/off what you want to find, then the active command will use the find pane settings

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