kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 7 Dec 2010, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:

> On 12/07/2010 03:08 AM, Marco Mattila wrote:
> > I tested the output with gerbview and gerbv. In gerbv everything's ok.
> > Now that I checked again with gerbview the negative layer kind of
> > works. However, since negative layers in gerbview are taken care of by
> > drawing them in background color, the negative stuff will be
> > "subtracted" from all layers below the negative layer. Fixing this
> > probably requires that the drawing of a layer is first done onto a
> > temporary device context/bitmap and blitting the result to the main
> > window. I can take a look at this.

I'm not suprised. There are even fabs services which don't handle
negative layers out there... layers are an 'advanced' gerber feature (even if
it's in the standard!) and not everything handle them correctly. The
most portable way to subtract the pads from the silk is, indeed,
computing the subtraction in core and outputting only the remaing parts.
Which is, of course, a PITA (kbool would help and in facts it's very
similar to the clearance check in the DRC). Well, there is a whole
business in gerber postprocessors, there must be a reason for this :D

I am *expecting* problem using negative layer, but since it's an
optional feature I'd just say something like "warning: this function
need a complete gerber implementation and could fail with most other
ones out there :D"

--
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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