Painful hours are spent manually manipulating the script and manually relabeling reference designators. Working through the limitations is time-consuming with no guarantee that the board will be correctly re-annotated. Third-party apps with their limitations work differently in every layout situation. Learning a third-party script without support information becomes difficult as guesswork by trial and error is the only way to limp through the tool. But the re-annotating script contains limitations that require manual manipulation as well. EDA user websites point to third-party apps that will re-annotate your design components. PCB designers are left with searching the web to find if colleagues have discovered workarounds.

Annotation Cannot Be Done Without a Third-Party Script Let us take a deeper look into custom global properties and reference designator for PCB designs. Manually re-annotating can take days, so many legacy designs have disorderly annotation. This has necessitated PCB designers to manually re-annotate layouts during the design process. Tools to rearrange location of the reference designators on the PCB have been lacking in EDA tools. If the arrangement of reference designators is maintained from the schematic, the numbering would be erratic.

Best design practice is to number the reference designators consecutively on the PCB to allow easy discovery of components. Reference designators are the unique identifiers on a PCB for each and every component or free pad on the design.

Everybody has a silverware drawer and most are organized with caddys that divide the flatware into forks, knives, and spoons. Having a system to find many similar items in a short amount of time can be helpful in staying organized.

Altium annotate schematics