David SMITH wrote: > On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 07:05:05PM +0000, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote: >> On Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:47:28 +0000, David SMITH wrote: >> >>> From a user's point-of-view, it makes life much easier because they no >>> longer have the hassle of generating Gerbers (e.g. getting the correct >>> version of RS274, putting in the right number of decimal places, >>> including a readme file to indicate which layer is which, etc...) >> There are no such options in the gerber export dialog of pcb. > > Maybe not, but it's there in other packages, though, so this info still > needs to be communicated to the fab somehow (as it doesn't go in the > Gerber file itself), or you rely on them making correct assumptions.
FAB houses have lots of experience in dealing with the confusing and broken output from a whole slew of EDA tools. Note that some of this information is in fact there. For example, the leading/trailing zero bit and # of digits is *supposed* to go in the headers (at least for the drill files) but some tools give you flexibility to go outside of the specs and also generate garbage headers. > > Just looking at the FAQs on many of the PCB fab websites, it is clear > that people make all types of mistakes generating Gerbers (layer order > wrong, drill file mistakes, etc...). Being able to put this process > in the hands of the "professionals" who are doing it all the time just > means that errors are likely to be eliminated. > but now they need to deal with countless versions of countless different tools. And while it is not a big deal for pcb, it becomes a big deal if they are having to buy high dollar EDA tools and there is plenty of room for a "professional" to screw up generation of gerbers. Actually, I cringe at the idea of someone else generating gerbers for a board of mine without me reviewing the result with something like gerbv. There is a newer file format available that is supposed to address many of the shortcomings of the now-ancient RS274-X but the information I've been given by the one or two vendors I asked is that they still prefer RS274-X and haven't had a solid migration to the newer format(s). -Dan _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user