Hi Rob,

I have to use Feathers but the cable direction is opposite to the feathers listed in Symbols.
I explain, the direction of the cable is designed from the right side to the left side of the drawing.
And all Feathers symbols "from" have the connection point at the right side.
Rotation is not an option because labels are flipped.

I know that I can create custom Feathers but I would like a (SD7) native symbol to ensure compatibility with future version of SD.

Could those reversed Feathers be added in a future version ?

Thank you,

Hi Hughes,

I think you can do what you want to do today, without any change in Stardraw Design 7.3; simply use Arrange | Mirror | Horizontally to flip the feather, making it appear as direction-reversed.  You might also need to use the unlock cursor to select the Label in the Feather and in the Properties Grid change its Horizontal Alignment to "Far".

Our standard is that signals flow from left to right so it would not make sense to provide reversed feathers unless we also changed all symbols so that inputs were on the right and outputs on the left which, of course, is not something that we plan to do.

I hope this makes sense.


Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

Hi Rob,

I've already gone through the solution you suggest since long time. It's very time consuming.
But anyway, once I've direction-reversed a feather, is it better to copy/paste it or to pick another one from the Symbol Browser ?

Regarding "your" standard of signal flow.
That's easy to follow for a tuner, a DVD player.
But how to design a patch panel or a network switch?
From my experience, a network switch has a least one uplink connection. That means at least one cable from right to left.
Furthermore, the design you make for many IT Symbols doesn't help to respect the left to right cable direction: eg [Generic 1U 19" 24 Port Ethernet Switch] is designed with half of the ports on each side.
Same for nearly all network switches in the libraries.
That's the reason why I use a lot of feathers (even in the same plan view) to avoid turning around a symbols with a cable that should go to the right.

Am I the only one trying to cope with a network switch you designed that have half of the ports on the left side and making connections (cables) that should go at the right side of the drawing ?

Hi Hughes,

I'm surprised to hear that you think mirroring a symbol and changing one property is 'very time consuming' and, of course, you only have to do that once.  When it's done; you can just copy and paste (or save the result as a new custom symbol that you can use in any drawing).

It's a fair point that bi-directional ports break any uni-directional standard - c'est la vie! - and, of course, a port has to go on one side of a symbol or another, and sometimes the port will be on the wrong side, but this depends on the particular system. 

We think it's ok to 'turn' a cable, or a symbol, or a port (there is a movie on this at https://www1.stardraw.com/stardraw2/sd7/movies) wherever it's necessary, but I understand why you might employ a personal standard that does not allow this, and we want to allow flexibility where required.

So, I'm happy to say that there is now a folder of Reversed feathers, under Stardraw Online Symbols | Feathers which, in this case, seems appropriate as a solution. 
 


Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

Hi Rob,

Thank you for the addition of Reversed feathers in SD7.

Regards,