I'm trying to place a bunch of small text on the silkscreen in Kicad but I don't see where to change the default size. Where is this setting in Kicad?
Electronic – How to change the default silkscreen font size in Kicad
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In recent versions of KiCad there is a Footprint Library Browser, allowing exactly what you asked for. It can be opened from inside PcbNew via the menu option "View >> Library Browser".
KiCad treats the designators differently than the normal silkscreen (not sure why), but as long as they are visible (right click, select "visible" - it looks like yours are set to "invisible") then they will be on the final gerber.
Any text set to invisible can be set not to show by selecting the "render" tab (top right) and deselecting "hidden text".
See the greyed out designator in the below clip compared to the others for an example of the difference:
You can confirm this by plotting the top silk layer and checking in GerbView. Notice that the greyed out designator C8 isn't plotted on the gerber.
P.S - The KiCad-users mailing list is an excellent place for enquiries, features suggestions, bug reports, etc.
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Best Answer
With KiCad (ver BZR 4022 Stable), it is easy to achieve this.
Open up your KiCad PCB and go to "Dimensions ยป Texts and Drawings".
On the Texts and Drawings window, you will see two textboxes that allow you to enter default horizontal and vertical sizes for text, as it can be seen in the below screenshot.
Enter your preferred values and click OK.
Note: These textboxes may include values that has lots of digits after the decimal point. This is because of the KiCad's unit conversion system. If you switch to metric units, you will see these values are normal.