1. boxsym-rnd: when and why Old parts have fancy graphical symbols, you look at a resistor or a diode and you can tell them apart without any text written on them. New parts like ICs, modules, blocks are not like that: they are boring boxes mostly defined by text printed over them. A well known example I am going to use in this test request is the classic 7400 IC and the generic multi-channel opamp. Since these are somwhat oldish parts, there are two ways of drawing these examples: A. special shape, so shape somewhat determines functionality B. generic box with some text explaining it's a NAND gate or opamp boxsym-rnd can do B only. If we are looking from the slotting point of view, there are mainly three cases: A. single, big symbol, all terminals included B. homogenous slotted setup with multipe copies of the same symbols, each having all common terminals (power pins in our examples) C. inhomogenous slotted setup with multiple copies of 2 or more different symbols; in case of our examples, this means two symbols for 7400 (a single NAND gate and a 2 terminal vcc,gnd power block); and 2 symbols for an opamp (an opamp channel without any power terminals and a separate V+,V- power block). boxsym-rnd can do all three. The idea is that you write a structured text file that describes how many different symbols you will have, and what terminals (arranged how) in each of the symbols. Plus you cna declare symbol attributes. Then you can run boxsym-rnd with the file name and it will generate your symbols so you don't need to draw them manually. It's also easier to write, generate and mantain a family of similar parts in the boxsym format than in the final symbol format, because the boxsym variant is more purely about the concept while the symbol file already has a lot of noise, details on graphics. 2. documentation You can find the manual page describing how to execute the tool and on the file format in trunk/doc/man. Online version: http://www.repo.hu/projects/cschem/man/ 3. how to run it for now At the moment we don't ahve make install, so the only way to run it is from source. You need to cd to trunk/util/boxsym-rnd and run it as: ./boxsym-rnd 7400.bs (7400.bs is the example supplied with the tool) This spits out 3 symbols: an all-in one 7400.sym and two more, 7400_power.sym and 7400_logic.sym for inhomogenous slotting; all file names are derived from the input file name and slot names described in the file. An example on non-slotted bs can be found in trunk/library/src/symbol/power/ldo.bs - this one is compiled into the stock library's ldo symbol. Please test if boxsym-rnd works as specified and as expected.