symbols
Schematic Symbols
What are schematic symbols?
Schematic symbols are an abstract representation of the physical components
used in electronic circuits. A physical component can be an intergated
circuit (IC), a passive device (like a resister), an active device (like
a diode or transistor), etc... Basically a symbol is the representation
of the component on a schematic sheet.
gEDA/gaf includes a symbol library of over 1400 symbols. The file format
for the symbols is in an easy to understand ASCII format and is the
exact same file format as schematic files.
What symbols are part of the library?
You can view the contents of the symbol library in gEDA/gaf's
Online Symbol Library. You can also
download the symbols source tarball and look inside there.
Who are the symbol authors?
There are many symbol authors. Please see the AUTHORS file in the
symbols source directory for a complete list.
How do I create new schematic symbols?
Even though the gEDA/gaf symbol library is not tiny, you will probably
have to create symbols for the devices that you want to use in your
circuit designs. There are three ways of creating schematic symbols:
- Use gschem to draw the symbols. This is the most common and popular way. Please be sure to read the Symbol Creation Document on guidelines and tips for designing and drawing symbols.
- Use one of the symbol creation programs. There are several programs out there which take as input a text file describing the symbol and as output generate schematic symbols. Two popular symbol generators are: gmk_sym and tragesym. Both of these symbol generators are part of gEDA/gaf's Utilities.
- The final option is to create symbols with a text editor. The file format of the symbols (and schematics) can be found in the File Format Document.
How can I contribute/share my symbols with the gEDA community?
The gEDA project always welcomes symbol contributions. There are two
ways to contribute or share symbols:
Where can I download it?
The symbols are part of gEDA/gaf and can be downloaded from:
gEDA's download page
