>> I just sent my serial DAC gerber files to a fab house. I had to hack the >> silk screen file to include an outline and a couple of features that the >> Eagle CAM refused to pick up as silk screen features. What I did was >> find the Gerber code of the features in the other files a pasted it into >> the silk file. This worked well but, if I need to continue doing this in >> the future, it would be nice to have an editor that can edit Gerber >> files directly. Does anyone have a favorite Linux Gerber editor that I >> should look at? Thanks.
I'll try to make a couple of suggestions for you. * First, off, Gerber is not really intended to be an editable format. It's meant to be an export format, used to drive PCB manufacturing equipment, and that's it. It's analogous to .pdf in the sense that it's an output format, not a format for editing. That being said, there are several programs out there which allow you to edit Gerber. Valor and CAM350 come to mind. They are very expensive programs used by PCB houses to CAM jobs prior to fabrication (i.e. inspect the Gerbers and bring them into compliance with the factory's manufacturing rules and abilities). I'm not sure this information is useful to you. * On the open-source side of things, a decent Gerber *viewer* is gerbv: http://gerbv.sourceforge.net/ An interesting, new feature of gerbv is that it will re-export Gerbers which have been read in. Currently, this feature is used to export good, compliant Gerbers generated from buggy CAD programs (e.g. Eagle, Orcad). In the future, the gerbv team is interested in implementing some amount of editablity into the program. When that happens, you will be able to use gerbv to do what you want. Disclaimer: I am a developer and release manager for gerbv, so my opinions about it are biased. * Thirdly, Eagle evidently doesn't fulfill your needs, so I'd suggest you try a different package. I don't know why you aren't using an open-source design suite. The cannonical electronic design suite for Linux is gEDA/gaf for schematics and netlisting: http://geda.seul.org/ and PCB for layout: http://pcb.sourceforge.net/ If you take a look at the gEDA page, you'll see scores of PCBs designed and built with the gEDA tool chain. Users range from hobbiests to educators to companies. Support is via the geda-user mailing list, which is generally friendly and ultra-responsive. And the cost is zero, as you'd expect. Disclaimer: I am also a gEDA developer too. Cheers, Stuart ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
