DipTrace Forum

Whenever we create a shape, to select its corner co-ordinates, there is a handy snap highlighter (an orange square with X cross in the middle) in DipTrace which shows the significant points of any component, so that those points can be chosen as co-ordinates, compared to only using grid points. It's the one shown in the image below.

You can see that orange colored square with X cross in the middle, which appears when I hover the cursor over that point. This highlighter is also useful when using measure tool.

But this highlighter is not being shown while creating copper pours. Enabling this highlighter option for copper pour will be very helpful to choose the significant points of a component as the corner of copper pour instead of just using the grid points.

Thank you for your suggestion to improve the program. I have added this option to the developer’s review list.
For now, as a workaround, you can turn off the grid (F11) and draw the copper pour vertices at any points without snapping to the grid.

Thank you for the reply.

Regarding the suggestion to disable "snap to grid", it works well when we want to place the vertices apart from the grid points. But still this method doesn't allow the user to precisely choose the exact coordinates of any significant points on the component.

My usual workaround is to use the "Point / Comment" option from "Place Dimension" tool, to get the exact coordinates of the significant points, since the snap highlighter is enabled for that tool. I take a note of the coordinate, open the properties of the copper pour and manually type the coordinates under "Border" tab. But we can see how time consuming this method will be when multiple such vertices are involved.

Nevertheless I will use any of these workarounds for the time being till this functionality is implemented, since you mentioned that you have added this option to the developer's review list.

Thanks again.