nivek@rover.ri.cmu.edu (Kevin Dowling) (10/02/89)
>From: phil@ingr.com (Phil Johnson) >Subject: Re: PC Boards: Gerber formats Phil, Thanks for your posts. I have found a couple of PC houses that are shifting away from Gerber. Several are doing the artwork directly on photo-typesetters like the linotype. I found a company that can take our McCad disks from the Mac and they directly print on a Linotype. No Gerber. I tried on one of the Linotypes here on campus and got great results with using a mylar film. (Kodak HN LaserFilm #2692) At $11 for 11x17 pages the price is right for the artwork. The drill 'tape' is directly generated by the program too. The place we sent board designs to said the were limited only by the board size capabilities of their drilling machines (18x24 in their case) I suspect many of the PC houses will find themselves having to shift to this format. The typesetters are far more flexible and faster than the old X-Y aperature technology. If the program allows previewing on a laser printer there's no reason why the same Postscript file can't be sent to a photoplotter. You say people won't want to pay the cost for photoplotting in Postscript but I think it'll be cheaper, easier and faster in the long run. Boards of very high complexity can easily be generated, without resorting to clever methods in 'painting' areas. I guess if these programs very easily provided the Gerber output simply as a menu selection or something I wouldn't care and I would get my boards and the gory details would be transparent to me. Unfortunately, at least with McCad, it isn't provided easily except through the use of translator programs that assume knowledge of Gerber formats. Anyway, our boards should be back in a few days. nivek Aka : Kevin Dowling Bell: (412) 268-8830 Arpa: nivek@rover.ri.cmu.edu Mail: Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pgh, PA 15213-3890