At 03:42 AM 5/25/2006, Laurie Biddulph wrote: >But the Mechanical Layer 1 doesn't have anything to do with >component footprints!
It is an available layer, indeed, all the mech layers may be part of a footprint. If you accidentally -- or someone accidentally -- places a primitive there, or, default excuse, a stray cosmic ray rearranged a layer assignment, you can have mech layer information in a footprint. Lots of people do it deliberately, mech layers have every bit as much to do with footprints as *any* layer, I think. You can have keepouts in footprints, a little strip of board edge in a footprint (I've done with with connectors that must be placed a specific distance from the edge of the board), etc. You can even place .refdes strings on any layer, including mech layers, or assembly notes, or whatever. Footprint primitives, when the footprint is placed, are generally locked, but, of course, you can unlock them. This is why I suggested that you might try unlocking all footprints. It still might not work, since some commands, in the past, have seemed to assume that component parts aren't to be deleted by a global edit and I have not looked at the behavior recently. If you can find the primitive in the ASCII database, and it is part of a footprint, it will have a component number (an internal assignment, not something you can manipulate in Protel) associated with it. It's my view that *all* PCB data should be in the ASCII file. I think that got lost with DXP, some stuff, I understand, is not there. Has this changed with the latest and greatest? (If there is data that could not be represented reasonably in ASCII, such as a bitmap image, then, when the ASCII file is written, this data should be dumped to a separate file, referenced in the ASCII database.... or something like that.) ____________________________________________________________ You are subscribed to the PEDA discussion forum To Post messages: mailto:[email protected] Unsubscribe and Other Options: http://techservinc.com/mailman/listinfo/peda_techservinc.com Browse or Search Old Archives (2001-2004): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] Browse or Search Current Archives (2004-Current): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
