PCB SKILL Find text body center

Question

Hello, 
 How can I find the body center of a 45 degree oriented text in SKILL? This is not the bounding box (bbox) center nor the origin center. I want to rotate text just like in Allegro by Rotate/Spin->Body Center. I found a way for text which is 0,90,180 degree orientation, but not for 45 degree. I always can first rotate to 0 degree and then find center, but then I lose original center position. 
 Thank you

mstaub · Answer

In Allegro text movement is performed based on the justification setting for the text (Either Left, Center, or Right). These correspond to the bottom left, bottom center, or bottom right of the text object. With that, and to ease the complexity of your Skill code, I would plan on moving them based on these justifications. Rotation also happens around the justification point, and not the center of the text itself. For example if you had three overlapping text objects which all appear to be in the same location, but all have different justifications assigned to them you would get a different value for each when looking at the xy location for the object. You would also get three different results if you tried to rotate all 3 90 degrees. 
 The two common Allegro methods for rotating a text object in Skill are axlDBChangeText() and axlTransformObject(), both based on the the justification setting. 
 That said, you could use axlTransformObject() and some trig (based on the justification xy, character width, character height, char spacing and text length) to calculate the "body center" of the text object and rotate/move accordingly. I know this is possible because I have a tool (unfortunately not public) that does this where I change the size of reference designators to make them as large as they can be, based on predefined text block definitions, so that they still fit within the assembly outline of the parent symbol they are attached to. I also position the text in the center of the symbol and match the symbols rotation. 
 Alternatively you could explore a combination of using Skill to find the text and use axlShell() to simulate a script (calling the rotate command) to rotate the text snapping to the body center of the text object. Probably not the preferred method to solve this, but you might be able to get this to work.

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PCB SKILL Find text body center

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