4.6 Missing symbols

Sometimes you may see on your screen such strange symbols instead of components you would expect in your schematic:

That means here should be a symbol that has not been found in any of the libraries added in your project. The symbols above are placeholder symbols, that is, some symbols intended just for such cases.

If title block symbol is missing in your libraries, the visible effect will be a bit other. You’ll see just an empty page. The actions described below will however help you in such a case as well.

Some symbols may be missing for several reasons:

• You distributed your design without some necessary symbol. For example, you sent your schematic by email without symbols and the receiver does not have those symbols.
• You did not add a necessary library in your project. For example, you created a project, then disabled system libraries using reset-component-library, though did not add some required symbol into the local library of your project.
• You misspelled the title block name in your configuration file. See Title block symbol.
• The name of the title block symbol in your local configuration is spelled right, but it is missing in the libraries of your project after disabling some of them as above.
• You edited your symbol file contents manually in your text editor or by a script and misspelled the names of some symbols.

In order to figure out what’s wrong you may do as follows:

• Open lepton-schematic, hit I to see the enabled libraries and look at what libraries are really present.
• If you are working with one of the utilites that supports interactive mode (e.g. lepton-netlist), enter the mode and type the following in the REPL:

  (use-modules (lepton library component))
  (component-libraries)
  

• In lepton-schematic, you can do the same, thought the results will be displayed in the Log window. See Log window for more.

The two last options will show you what libraries are enabled and what are their names and full paths to them.

Check in the log window (Log window) or in the log file (Logging) what RC files have been loaded. Check also what configuration files have been loaded. If you don’t know what configuration files have been used, you can enter the REPL in lepton-schematic or in one of the utilities supporting interactive mode (like lepton-netlist) and look for system and user configuration directorires. See lepton-cli shell for recipes on how to do that. The local project configuration directory is most often the directory where its schematics reside, though the directory with schematics may be one in the subdirectory tree of your project. If in doubt, try in the directory with schematics:

(config-filename (path-config-context (getcwd)))

or use the full path in the form "/path/to/my/project" instead of (getcwd) in this command.

After having discovered what and where (in which config file) is enabled, search for a library with the symbol required and add it (See Component library setup) or add required symbol(s) to the local library directory of your project.

If you misspelled the name of a symbol, just fix it.