QCADesigner Documentation

Manipulating Objects

You can select objects on any active layer.

You can select a single object by left-clicking on it.

You can select any group of objects by left-clicking on the workspace and dragging the mouse to create a selection rectangle. The objects contained in that selection rectangle will be hilighted in red. There are many things you can do with a selection:

You can add objects to your selection by holding down Shift and creating a selection rectangle, as above. Deselected objects in the rectangle will be selected.

You can remove objects from your selection by holding down Ctrl and creating a selection rectangle. Selected objects in the rectangle will be deselected.

You can create a copy of your selection by clicking "Copy" [Copy]

. A copy of the selected objects will be created, unless your current selection cannot be dropped. If the location where you want to place the copy is off-screen, you can use the mouse wheel to scroll there. Alone, the mouse wheel scrolls the workspace up←→down. To scroll left←→right, hold down Ctrl while scrolling.

To mirror a selection of objects, first select the objects you would like to mirror. Then, click "Mirror" [Mirror]

. From the menu that pops up, choose either "Horizontally", if you want to mirror across the x-axis, or "Vertically", if you want to mirror across the y-axis.

To rotate a block of objects by 90°, first make a selection, then click "Tools→Rotate Selection":

Main Menu:Tools->Rotate Selection

Your selection will be rotated 90°. Click the menu item again and again to rotate by 180° and 270°, respectively.

TIP: To rotate a copy of your selection, first make a selection, click "Copy", then click "Tools→Rotate Selection".

To delete a selection of objects, first make such a selection. Then press the "Delete" key to delete your selection.

When you drag a selection and your objects are snapped to the grid, you cannot move those objects around arbitrarily. However, by choosing [Translate]

, you can move a selection by an arbitrary number of nanometers.

To accomodate multilayer circuits, it is now possible to change the appearance of cells. This does not affect their simulated behaviour. It is merely a means of visually identifying cells overlapping on different layers. To modify the appearance of selected cells, click Alternate style and choose from among 3 appearances from the popup menu.

TIP: In the cell libraries, we observe the following convention:

Cells on the main layer are left unaltered, except for those underlying "via" cells.
Cells on "via" layers and those accessing "via" layers are drawn using the circular appearance.
Cells on "crossover" layers are drawn using the "X" appearance, except those accessing "via" layers.

This creates crossovers according to the following convention:

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