LTspice printer-friendly settings

Printer-friendly charts

By default LTspice uses a set of colors suited only for displaying on a computer screen, but with a couple of problems:

• The charts using the default color-theme do not scale nicely, because of the low contrast (ex: green lines on black background)
• The charts are not suited for printing (black backgrounds).

Fortunately, the colors can be changed easily. From the “Tools” menu pick “Color preferences”.

From the “Color palette editor” pick the “WaveForm” tab.

For every “Selected Item” from the table below we set the colors:

Item	Red	Green	Blue
Background	255	255	255
Grid	0	0	0
Axis	0	0	0
Inactive axis	0	0	0

Now the “Preview” area should look like this:

Printer-friendly schematics

Using the same steps as above, go to the “Color Palette Editor”.

From here configure the following items:

Item	Red	Green	Blue
Wires	0	0	0
Junctions	0	0	0
Component body	0	0	0
Graphic flag	0	0	0
Unconnected pin	0	0	0
Background	255	255	255

Labeled blocks inside schematics

From the menus, we choose:

• Edit ⇨ Draw ⇨ Rectangle , do draw a rectangle;
• Edit ⇨ Text , do add a text comment.

With these, we split larger circuits into blocks, and label these blocks. The text comments are ignored by the simulation engine, being useful only for the end-users.

Labeled nets

We can tie together two points on the schematic without drawing a wire between them. If two points on the schematics are labeled with the same “net” name, the simulation backend considers them as being the same. Another useful detail is that on the chart resulting from the simulation, the traces are labeled with their net name.

Example

We can observe the following details:

• V_in and V_out are labeled on both the schematic and the simulation trace;
• The functional blocks of the schematic are highlighted and labeled clearly;
• The amplifier circuit (on the left) is powered by the power-supply block (on the right) without any explicitly-drawn wire - VCC is connected using the net label, and GND is connected using a symbol.

Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcut	Role
F2	Add component
F3	Add wire
F4	Add label
F9	Undo
G	Add GND connection
R	Add resistor
C	Add capacitor
L	Add inductor
Ctrl+R	Rotate
Ctrl+E	Mirror