Highlighting Objects

When you edit a design in EPIC, you may want to change the color of one or more objects for easy reference. Here are some reasons for highlighting.

• To find something later.
  
  
• You run a path delay and you want to highlight the path you just checked.
  
  Highlights are especially helpful in a dense design, and will work only if you have the automatic highlighting option set. You can set the option with the main window attributes form. See the “Main Window Attributes” section. You can also set it from the EPIC Command Line dialog box. See the “Setattr” section of the “Command Line Syntax” chapter.
  
  The automatic highlighting option determines whether objects are automatically highlighted. When the option is enabled, delay paths are highlighted after a delay command, while nets being edited are highlighted after a manual route. When the option is disabled, no automatic highlighting occurs. By default, the option is disabled.
  
  
• You want to highlight the routes you add during manual routing.
  
  

Set the Autohighlight option.

Before you can use the highlight feature, the layer containing the object(s) that you want to highlight must be selected in the Layer Visibility dialog box.

You can highlight objects in the following ways.

• Select them with the cursor, then pressing the hilite push button.
  
  
• Selecting hilite from the View menu.
  
  
• Specifying the layer and the object name in the EPIC Command Line dialog box.
  
  

You can also specify a color for the highlighted object(s). See the “Hilite” section of the “Command Line Syntax” chapter.

Selected objects are deselected based on the setting of the auto_deselect attribute. If the auto_deselect attribute is set to False, selected objects will not appear highlighted until you select the object again. If auto_deselect is set to True, highlighted objects appear in the proper color automatically. You can set this attribute from the command line or from the Main Window Attributes dialog box.