gEDA-user: Re: gEDA PCB Lib

[Chad Robinson <crj@lucubration.com>]

Stephen Meier wrote:
> IPC-SM-782A is 228 pages. It does contain documentation for TS-005 which 
> is what "I think"  TO-263 has been renamed as. Forgive me the poor 
> drawing but it does contain the info from the IPC document
Yes, that looks pretty close although TO-263 has three legs plus the big 
attach pad. It's basically a surface-mount version of the TO-220.

Is there a way to extract graphical representations from PCB footprints, like 
a JPG or similar? One of the things that's really painful is that there's no 
GUIDE and a lot of these footprint names don't really tell you what they are. 
I'd be happy to put some scripts together to assemble an HTML/PDF pair with 
pictures but I can't see a way to do it.

If anybody wants a sample let me know, I can send you a few pages of the 
Circuitmaker guide. It comes in PDF format, and has pretty clear sections - 
Surface Mount Gull-Wings, Surface Mount J-Leads, Through-Hole Discrete, etc. 
And you end up with package names that give you a lot of information about 
what you're using, like SM_R_0803 (0803 SM resistor) is different from 
SM_C_0803 (0803 SM capacitor) even if the pads are identical because the silk 
screen layer might be slightly larger on the cap, tantalums have their own 
names, etc.

IMO it's very difficult to find packages in PCB, and if we could make this 
better it would be a lot easier to use. You tend to have to memorize what 
you're looking for and where to go to get it. I'd be more willing to 
contribute footprints and eventually start using PCB for my designs if I could 
address this point.

Regards,
Chad