Your own symbols
Eighty-eight symbols ship with Quickdraw, and your bench has something they do not cover. There are two ways to add one, and a third thing that happens automatically when you send a diagram to someone.
Draw one from parts you already have
Select two or more symbols on the canvas and choose Edit ▸ Save selection as symbol…. The arrangement becomes a single symbol, with a tile in the component bar, that you can place like any other.
This is the one to reach for first. A “detection module” that is really a photodiode, an amplifier and a filter is a composite, and drawing it once beats drawing it in every diagram.
The insides are frozen when you save it — a composite is a picture, not a live group. To change one, place it, choose Edit ▸ Explode into members, edit the parts, and save the selection again. Exploding gives you back exactly the arrangement it was made from.
Define one from scratch
File ▸ New symbol… (⇧⌘N) opens a dialog where you describe a symbol — its body, its
ports, its name and category — with a live preview that is the actual symbol, rendered
the same way the canvas will render it.
Your symbols are stored as plain JSON files in ~/.dspdiagram/symbols/, one per symbol,
so you can back them up, copy them to another machine, or fix one in a text editor.
Right-click a symbol you made for Edit symbol… and Delete symbol…. Editing
re-renders every instance already placed in your open diagram — no restart. The key is
shown but locked: it is what every .dsd using the symbol refers to, so an edit changes
what the symbol looks like, never what it is called.
Favourites
Right-click any tile — yours or built-in — and Add to favourites. Favourites get their
own row in the component bar and are what Quick Add (⌘K) offers first.
They stay in the order you added them. Nothing reorders them by how often you use them, because the value of the row is that a symbol is always in the same place.
Symbols that travel
When you save a diagram that uses your own symbols, their definitions are embedded in
the file. Send the .dsd to a colleague and it opens correctly on their machine, even
though they have never seen your symbol.
Three rules make that safe:
- The file wins. If they happen to have a symbol with the same key that is a different part, the document’s own definition is used for that document. The diagram renders as its author drew it.
- Opening changes nothing on disk. An embedded symbol is not installed into their library by opening the file.
- Installing is explicit. File ▸ Add symbols from this diagram… copies them into their own library, skipping any key they already have rather than overwriting it.
If a symbol cannot be resolved at all, it is drawn as a labelled dashed box instead of refusing to open the file. The diagram is still editable, still exportable, and still tells you exactly what is missing.
Next
Screenshots still needed on this page: the Save selection as symbol dialog, and the New symbol… dialog with its live preview.