PCB Enhancements

Altium Designer 16.1 brings some small, yet beneficial improvements to the PCB Editor, including enhanced flagging of invalid design rules, easier ways to rename mechanical layers, and enhanced justification control for text strings. While small on their own, they collectively enhance your PCB design experience, and aid in delivering greater productivity and efficiency.

Enhanced Flagging of Invalid Design Rules

In previous versions of the software, an invalid design rule would be flagged - within the PCB Rules and Constraints Editor dialog - by presenting the name of that rule in red, both in the left-hand rule tree, and any summary view (rule category, or rule type) in which that rule appeared, on the right-hand side. In Altium Designer 16.1, this flagging is literally taken to the next level, by turning the text for the rule type, and rule category red also. So now, if you have collapsed an area of the rule tree that contains an invalid rule, you will still be alerted to it, at a higher level in the hierarchy.

An example of the additional highlighting applied in the left-hand rule tree for an invalid design rule, at higher levels in the hierarchy (rule type, and rule category).

Easier ways to Rename Mechanical Layers

This release sees a couple of additional ways in which you can rename a mechanical layer:

• By selecting the mechanical layer, on the Board Layers And Colors tab of the View Configurations dialog, then right-clicking and choosing the Rename command from the context menu. This focuses the layer's name field ready for typing in the new name.

Rename the currently selected mechanical layer using the Rename command available on the right-click menu. This provides an alternative to selecting the name field and pressing
F2 (or selecting the name field, and then clicking again).

• By double-clicking on the layer's tab, at the bottom of the workspace, and entering the required new name in the properties dialog that appears.

Change the name of a mechanical layer with even greater ease, through a quick double-click on its associated layer tab.