[SOLVED] Altium PCB... components keepout

Hello friends,

Still learning Altium PCB not so bad after all (one of my colleague just told me some friend had to read several manual pages for Cadence just to place components...uuhhh)

Well.. In OrCad all (originally) components had some keep-out rect, and so our own designed. I noticed in Altium doesn't (it's a MC74HC04 from OnSemi library but 0805 resistors, caps are the same).

The question is libraries are missing keepout or Altium has other concept to avoid placing one components on top of another.

Thanks for clarifications.

PS. Another small question: There is possible to select all comps text designators and change size all together?

Altium has a lot of different rules which stop you placing components on top of each other. All of them are defined under 'Design > Rules...' mostly the conflicts which will come up due to components being too close are silkscreen-silkscreen clearance or silkscreen-pad/net clearance etc etc.

You can change the size of all designators in one hit as per the following,

Right click on one designator, and select find similar objects, a dialogue asking for which parameters must be matched appears, select that all selected components must have string_type=designator and select same, click okay, all designators are now selected.

Using the PCB Inspector you can now change the height and text width of all designators in one hit, you can not change all designators by right clicking on one designator whilst others are selected, it just doesn't work.

Thank you very much. Worked just perfect.