Hi, Having just put together a board using PCB, I have a few queries about its output facilities.
The electronics development people here fab using tracing paper and a UV light box, so to achieve maximum quality output, I always mirror the output such that the printed toner is oriented towards the copper of the board, giving a nice crisp exposure outline. PCB's auto-mirror option does the reverse of this, putting the toner away from the copper, and ticking "mirror" as well as auto-mirror does not reverse the behaviour. The layer identification text automatically output by PCB does not appear to mirror the same way, and the people in charge of PCB production here were of the opinion that the text only confused which way up the layer was supposed to be. They just like us to put some text off-board, on each side which would come out readable on the copper. What is the intended interpretation of the layer identification text? That it be readable as if looking through the board from the component side? If so, perhaps we could annotate it as such? I can't think how best to do that at the moment though. The pcb guy seemed to imply that the automatic text from PCB was not as how other packages would do it. A further feature request.. Is it possible to add a scale function to PCB's output, such that I can make the .ps file say a few 0.1% (can't remember exactly) larger than real size? The tracing paper shrinks as it passes through the laser printer by a known amount, but when you finally print the .pdf (from windows they do it), the scaling options aren't as fine-grained as that. Many thanks, -- Peter Clifton Electrical Engineering Division, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, 9, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FA Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!) _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
