gEDA-user: Announcement : gerbv-0.0.1

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

Greetings all,

hereby I proudly present the latest addition to the suite of 
free EDA tools: gerbv available at http://gerbv.sourceforge.net/

As the name implies it's a viewer for Gerber files. The 
graphical presentation is based on GTK+ and has the 
possibility to run Guile Scheme as backend for generating 
other file formats.

This release is "release early, release often"-release. What
is missing is listed below. The next week(s) work will involve
making the build system complete and fix the sourceforge site
to a usable state.

The aim for the project is to make a free Gerber Viewer that
is possible to run on as many platforms as possible. It has
been tested on Linux, NetBSD and Solaris. Another goal is also
the possiblity to run as much of the Gerber standard as possible.
Some excepetions will probably be made with seldom used and hard
to implement functions.


What is missing:
* Make target install not implemented
* Backends must be situated in the same directory as executable
* Multi quadrant arcs are not drawn (red lines will be drawn)
* Aperture macros (red dots shows where should be)
* Setting color on layer
* Show several files at the same time
* Gerbers definition of layers are ignored
* Proper documentation on how to interface the backend
* Surely other things I currently forgotten

What's there:
* Parses a lot of Gerbers. Considered usable with the excpetion for the
  aperture macros.
* Panning  and zooming
* Several files can be loaded and switched between
* Different loaded files are shown in different colors
* Scheme backend
* Disable backend at configuration time if you don't want to install Guile
* Start of a simple ps-generating backend


Scheme backend : short explanation
----------------------------------
Reading Gerber files are actually split into two parts:
1. parsing
2. drawing
When running in batch step 2 is replaced with a call to a Scheme
function where inparameters are the parsed information about the 
read Gerber file.


Download 
--------
Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/gerbv and click Get.


Install
-------
You must have GTK+ 1.2 (>1.2.3) installed. If you want to run the backend you 
must also have Guile installed (>1.3.4).

If you have the gerbv-0.0.1.tar.gz file in your current directory:
1. gzip -dc gerbv-0.0.1.tar.gz | tar xf -
2. cd gerbv-0.0.1
3. ./configure or ./configure --diable-batch if you don't want Guile backend
4. make
5. Test the program with for example:
   ./src/gerbv example/nollezappare/EtchLayer2Bottom.gdo 


Help 
----
It is greatly appreciated if to receive gerber files that crash gerbv.
Current status of gerbv makes it very probable, because there area so
many short cuts and not implemented stuff, so don't expect too much.
I will add it to the test suite, so make sure I can do that. If they're
you can still send it to me so I can diagnoze gerbv. But I will under
no circumstances sign any NDA's or similar.

Backends generating different format like TIFF or HPGL.

Autoconf hacks for platforms that currently supported. Note that Windoze
is not supported at all and will probably never be since there already
exists a wast amount of free Gerber viewers to that platform.


Thanks
------
The greatest thanks at all goes to Ales; starting up this list and 
hacking gaf. gaf was a big souorce of information when hacking the 
GTK+ stuff. I have never hacked graphical GUI's before.

The guys at SEUL for hosting this mailing list and the gEDA project.

Enjoy,
/spe
/----------------------------------\
! Stefan Petersen, MSc EE         !  \    
! http://www.stacken.kth.se/~spe/ !    \_________________________
! spe@stacken.kth.se              !    /  ! umop apisdn 'sdoo !
! stefan.petersen@home.se         !  /    ---------------------
\----------------------------------/