First question that came to my mind was - Why? ALL pcb producers with the "professional" stamp have DXF to Gerber converters already - which they are used to work with. By introducing one more source of errors, you might not do yourself any favour...
It's easy to convert DXF to Gerber. The pitfalls are the management of the aperture diameters, which have to be done more or less manually - if your Gerber plotter have fixed apertures, Also, the older Gerber formats didn't deal with drilling and milling data. Also, a professional pcb house want the drill file to be optimised ( or charge you to do it ). I did the Fortran IV dxf-gerber conversion in a PDP11-23 and the Gerber plotter was driven by a HP1000 and we had Northern Europes largest Gerber plotter. The Drill data paper punch was an ASR33. So it wasn't yesterday... //Dan, M0DFI On Thursday 17 January 2008 02:52:35 Dan McMahill wrote: > I'm wondering how hard it may be to teach gerbv to read and display dxf > files and also how hard it may be to teach gerbv perhaps to convert dxf > to gerber. I don't know if dxf to gerber would be any easier or harder > than dxf to pcb although both would be useful. > > In a way, there is an importer template of sorts. parse_y.y is the > parser that loads .pcb files so it shows how to create lines, polygons, > elements, etc. > > Have you looked much at dxflib? Is it any good? > > -Dan > > Bert Timmerman wrote: > > Hi Steve, > > > > If there is some sort of importer HID template available ;-) > > > > Methinks I know enough of the DXF fileformat to write such an importer. > > > > OTOH, I do not know enough of pcb how to do the import of entities > > "directly" (on the fly). > > > > Maybe an intermediate solution would be to write a stand alone (CLI?) > > translator and after translation add the entities with "File/Load layout > > data to paste-buffer". > > > > One question that comes to mind is: what do we want to import ? > > > > Would that be traces, outlines, keepouts, artwork, ... or all sorts of > > other (2D) stuff. > > > > First, I want to make some more advance with the DXF exporter, it still > > has a series of bugs to be squashed before it behaves stable. > > > > Kind regards, > > > > Bert Timmerman. > > > > On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 07:11 -0800, Steve Meier wrote: > >> Is a dxf importer available? > >> > >> Steve Meier > >> > >> Bert Timmerman wrote: > >>> Hi all, > >>> > >>> Last twelve months I have been busy (on and off in my spare free time) > >>> coding a dxf exporter for pcb. > >>> > >>> Status: it compiles and generates dxf files readable with QCad. > >>> > >>> There are probably a lot of bugs to be squashed ;-( > >>> > >>> So be patient with me. > >>> > >>> If you're still interested after all this, pay a visit to my home page: > >>> http://www.xs4all.nl/~ljh4timm/ > >>> > >>> Kind regards, > >>> > >>> Bert Timmerman. > >>> > >>> P.S.: all disclaimers you can think of apply ;-) > > _______________________________________________ > geda-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
