thanks all for your help... i was just playing about with some tracks and had them at 8 mil thick on an 8mil grid spaced at 8mil edge to edge and wanted to change them to 10mil edge to edge - thus, change the grid, 'snap to grid' and hope!.... more curiosity than a neccessity... im just fumbling about in my first few months on 99SE... i moved them manually...
Consider what would happen if there were a set of tracks at 8/8, one selected the tracks and there were a command which would "snap to grid", in this case a 10 mil grid. The command would have to determine *which* grid to snap to, because the tracks are starting out on a 16 mil grid and need to be on, what? an 18 mil grid? a 20 mil grid? If I assume 18 mils -- i.e., 10 mils edge to edge, then where is the starting reference? It would have to be specified. And what would be moved, really, would not be the *tracks* but, more precisely, the *endpoints*. And what happens to something else that connects to the track? Does it become disconnected?
Now, Mentor Expedition is a very expensive program, compared to Protel, if I've got it right. I think I recall seeing a demo one time. The interactive autorouting tools were really impressive.
Here is how I look at the situation Mr. Girvan brought us. I have a group of tracks that are routed with 8 mil clearance rules. I want to increase the clearance rules to 10 mils. *This is an autorouter task.*
To do this in the Protel environment, one would change the design rule. Then one would run a command that does not exist: "Reroute violating track," and a simple autorouter would attempt to reroute the tracks while keeping the route topology the same.
However, the need for something like this is not huge, because it is unusual that design rules get increased like that, and track bundles are not usually more than a few tracks wide. And the manual router is pretty fast at something like this.
I'd just change the rule and run a DRC. Then I'd set Loop Removal and just redraw the tracks (it's not necessary to delete the original, generally, Loop Removal will do that). For, say, five tracks, not even a minute. It is just a topology change.
A less experienced user might try to Move the tracks. That is going to be *much* slower. Rerouting them as described will automatically follow the new rules with no fuss.
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