Yep, I'm still lurking.... I don't actually recall the problem or solution - I have a terrible memory :(
I've asked my colleague, he does more day-to-day work in PCB than me and he recalls the following.... We need to save ASCII PCB for our assembly house that can't read 99se and beyond files into their manufacturing software. The simple solution was to delete all poly planes before saving as ASCII. As the planes are on internal layers they are of no use to the assembly house. We've been using DXP for some time now, I know the problem does not occur in DXP. I can't recall the last time we saved an ASCII PCB, though I expect he does the same thing just to save issuing a huge ASCII file. DXP is much more efficient as it also supports proper split planes and area fills, poly planes are now only needed for certain situations. j. -----Original Message----- From: Ian Wilson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 26 February 2004 09:54 To: Protel EDA Forum Subject: Re: [PEDA] PCB ascii files. On 11:27 AM 26/02/2004, Darcy Davis said: >Hey Folks, > >I've been getting an error while trying to save a PCB file in ascii format >in Protel 99SE sp6. I get the message > >Design Explorer Error! >File C:\....\Temp\xxx.tmp is too large. Jason Morgan had a similar problem way back in August 2002. From the look of it there was no obvious solution then - Jason are you still on this forum? (I will ask on the DXP forum as I know he is over there and I will see if DXP behaves differently.) It looks to me like there is some real limit in the size of ASCII PCB files - The size may depend on the size of polygons as well. Well - I just did an unscientific test on DXP 2004. A *very* large board with four massive polygons saved to ASCII as about 104MBytes. So either there is something else that triggers this limit (funny that it is the same as Jasons limit from a few years ago) or DXP behaves differently. The file format in DXP is different. The binary format actually contains heaps of stuff that looks like the P99SE ASCII format. So maybe the problem had to be fixed in order to support large binary-format designs. Ian * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
