Label Size Issues

In electrical mode, property text labels can be displayed or ``hidden''. If a label is hidden, the text is not displayed, only a small box at the text reference point is shown.

Labels with text size longer than a certain length will be shown as hidden by default. Hidden labels can be made visible, and vice-versa by clicking on the label or small box with the Shift key held. The label text can also be shrunk (with the Stretch command in the Modify Menu or with button 1 operations) to make it visible.

The label hidden status is persistent when the cell is saved in any format, however changing the display status does not change the modified state of a cell, thus this can be done in IMMUTABLE cells.

It should be noted that the ``real'' bounding box of the label, which is used to set the cell bounding box, is always the bounding box of the actual text. The hidden display mode is only available for the labels that contain property strings in electrical mode. Hidden labels can be selected only over the small box, and only the small box is highlighted. However, when moving or stretching, the entire ``real'' bounding box is highlighted.

The size threshold can be changed with the Maximum displayed property label length entry in the Window Attributes panel from the Set Attributes button in the Attributes Menu. Equivalently, the variable LabelMaxLen can be set to an integer greater than 6 with the !set command. The units are the width of a default-size character cell. In releases prior to 2.5.66, the default length was 32 default character size cells. In this and later releases, the value is 256 character cells. The larger threshold makes the nondisplay of label text much less probable, as this feature has been confusing to users.

Another way to obscure a long label is to convert it to a ``long text'' label.

To ``hide'' a label using the ``long text'' feature:

1. Select the label.
2. Press the side menu label button (with the black `T' icon).
3. Press the gray L button that appears to the left of the prompt line. This will cause the text editor to appear, loaded with the label text. If there is no L button, then the property can't use long text, which is true for properties that are ``always'' short, such as for device and model names.
4. In the text editor, press Save in the File menu. The editor will disappear, and the label displayed on-screen will have changed to ``[text]''.

To convert back to a normal label:

1. Select the long-text label (``[text]'').
2. Press the side menu label button (with the black 'T' icon).
3. With the cursor under ``[text]'' on the prompt line, press the Delete key. The full label text will appear on the prompt line.
4. Press Enter. The label will be shown normally.

Long property text labels can also be broken into multiple lines by adding embedded returns. These are added with Shift-Enter while the string is being edited. Note that this generates newlines in the SPICE output, so that in most cases the extra lines should begin with the ``+'' continuation character.