Re: gEDA: gerbv - first look

[Stefan Petersen <spe@stacken.kth.se>]

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Ian Gilmour wrote:

> I see it support PNG output - but how do I output an image (it doesn't have
> to be PNG) at a specified resolution rather than the arbitrary zoom factor
> I'm currently displaying the gerber file at.

Currently you can only output PNGs and thats without setting any scaling
at all. If you set a scale that adheres to a printer (like 300 dpi), the
picture will be huge and will make your Xserver die from exhaustion. It
might be possible to set some resolution parameters in PNG that will be
used when displayed. I have no idea on how it works, but that might the
path we take in the really short term.


> The scheme directory looks like it supports some gerber to postscript file
> conversion but I've had little success getting it to do anything useful. Is
> this code functional? If so how should it be invoked?

Yes there is a crude postscript generator for the Guile backend.
Unfortunate the interface between the parser and the backend has not been
kept up to date, so it only handles very simple gerber.

You invoke it with 'gerbv --batch=ps <gerber file>. Then gerbv starts
looking for a file called gerb-ps.scm, first in current directory, then in
$HOME/.gerbv/scheme/ and finally in where you will install it. If this
work you will get a ps file called <gerber file>.ps.

Anders and I are planning a "built-in" postscript generator.

Regards,
/spe
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! Stefan Petersen, MSc EE         !  \
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