Nathan House wrote:
> This will probably drive you nuts, but what's a part designator

The name of a part, like "R1", "C27", "IC5", etc.  However the same applies
to part values or any other text.

> and which way should it be rotated?

So it can be comfortably read, of course.

The point is not to try to get away with living up to the letter of some
law, but to make the schematic clearly and easily readable.  This applies t=
o
all parts of the schematic and any other documentation you generate, whethe=
r
someone explicitly asks for it or not.  Text from two different places
overlapping, for example, is also bad.  If I remember right, you had that i=
n
your PIC symbol.  I was actually going to use that to judge whether you
really cared or not, and therefore how much I was going to help.  Oh well,
can't use that anymore.

Again, clarity is something you should be striving for on your own, whether
I or anyone else bugs you about it or not.  Lack of attention to detail and
sloppiness in general is going to cause others to take you and your work
less seriously.  Most of the time they won't bother to tell you.  They'll
just walk away to various degrees and you'll never know you didn't get what
you could have from them or why.

Sometimes it may not even be concious or deliberate.  For example, a sloppy
looking homework assignment may get a worse grade than a neat one with the
same content when part of the grade is subjective, like a essay.  Sometimes
this may be the grader thinking "what a jerk dumping this slop on me", but
other times the grader may not even be aware of the bias.

What looks like crap is likely to be perceived as crap.  The totally amazin=
g
thing is how many people don't seem to get this obvious and very true
concept.  Duh.

A homework assignment is a rather benign example.  There are far more
serious examples.  Be extra extra careful with your resume, for example.
This may be obvious, but you'd likely be surprised at some of the resumes
I've seen.  For example, in one case I offered to do someone I knew a favor
in passing his resume to a contact I had at a place he was interested in.  =
I
asked him to forward me his resume so I could forward it to the manager wit=
h
a nice introduction and recommendation attached.  What he sent me was plain
text crap formatted to oblivion.  Now I had four choices:

  1 - Send it on as is.

  2 - Fix the formatting myself and pass it on as intended.

  3 - Tell my friend his resume was a mess and he needs to send me a
      cleaned up copy before I'll forward it.

  4 - Silently do nothing.

I chose #4.  #1 would have made me look bad because I would have been
endorsing the mess.  No thanks.  #2 would have been considerable work, and =
I
didn't feel it was my job.  #3 could have created bad blood "what do you
mean my resume sucks?".  #4 was just easier, and I felt a lot less obligate=
d
to help when I saw the mess that got dumped on me.  I never told the guy.
He probably has no idea why he didn't get a call from that company.


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