I was not clear. I want to flip the entire PCB layout and be able to work on and modify it - not just view it.
It should be understood that a Flip View option would allow just what Mr. Mitchell has stated he wants. You could work on the board while the view was flipped.
There is one thing he might want to do which Flip View would *not* allow him to do. That is to take IP from one design and use it, flipped, in another design. Imagine a piece of SMT design that uses the Top layer and perhaps three additional inner layers below Top. The vias are all blind vias going no deeper than the fourth layer. Now, imagine an 8-layer board. Could you take the design on the Top, flip it, and put it on the bottom?
This kind of design need is the reason why it was deemed important enough to attempt to create a server that would do the flip. It should be realized that simply having a flip view would be quite nice, but there are situations where you would really want to interchange Top and Bottom. However, this is not quite as simple as it might seem at first blush. What do you do with the inner layers? Do they flip as well? And the mech layers?
Obviously, everything has to mirror, but layer sequence would also be inverted in a proper flip. What happens to the mechanical layers? I think that mech layers in DXP can be paired, but this was not the case in 99SE. And design rules: in a complete flip everything that refers to layers would have to flip.
What Mr. Mitchell has not told us is *why* he wants to flip the board. If it is just to be able to read bottom side designators while he works on the bottom, flip view would do the job quite well, it would not be necessary, just for that purpose, to go through the rather complex process of moving every primitive in the file.
So, to summarize, there are two tools we'd like: Flip View, which would allow working on a PCB while it is viewed as a mirror image, and Flip Selection, perhaps, which would be a much more complex command that would require the specification of flip axis, depth of flip, etc.
And neither of these is available in Protel at present, though you could use a mirror by the monitor....
(unless you can get the server from Mr. Wilson, which was never sufficiently debugged for him to consider it reliable, if I recall correctly.)
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