Preferences

File ‣ Schematic drawing preferences… controls the appearance of the current schematic — line widths, colours and fonts.

The Preferences dialog

Fig. 33 The Preferences dialog, grouped by element type.

Per-schematic styling

Styling works on two levels:

  • The application’s global defaults are the template for every new schematic.

  • When you change a setting in Preferences, it applies to the current schematic and is saved into its <name>.ini sidecar file (see Projects). Re-opening that schematic restores exactly the look it was saved with — independent of the machine’s global defaults.

This is what lets a book or report keep a consistent house style across all its figures.

What you can change

The dialog is grouped by element type, including:

  • Symbol — stroke and text colour.

  • Wire — colour and width.

  • Net label, Component refdes, Component parameters — colour, font and size.

  • Text annotations, Hyperlinks — fonts and colours.

  • Grid — minor and major line colours.

  • Wire handles / connections — the colour and size of wire selection handles, and the connection colour used for the unconnected-pin markers (see Wiring).

  • Junctions — colour and radius.

  • Rendering — turn LaTeX typesetting of labels on or off. Leave it off in NGspice schematics: a simulator expression is code, not mathematics, and only the part of it that is also valid mathematics can be typeset. A value that cannot be typeset is shown as plain text — it is never rendered wrongly. If you want a typeset expression on an NGspice schematic, either accept the generated form, or hide the value and place the formula yourself with Place ‣ LaTeX…; such a snippet is for display only and is not netlisted.

  • Scaling defaults — default sizes for parameter tables, LaTeX fragments and images.

Changes take effect immediately on the canvas.