gEDA-user: Land pattern naming convention per IPC

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

Guys --

I happened to find a very interesting document calling out
specifications for land pattern naming.  You can get it here:

http://www.pcblibraries.com/resources/7351.asp

It's the last item in the list.

The land pattern naming convention is apparently an IPC standard.
Perhaps if we adhered to this convention when creating footprint
libraries, then we could eliminate some of the confusion surrounding
the whole light vs. heavy symbol issue.  That is, we could always
point to the standardized names for the parts when newbies ask about
which footprints exist. 

BTW:  This web site has a number of interesting footprints for
download.  They are distributed in a strange compressed format.  If
you download the viewer and look at the footprint files with it, you
will see the footprint info is somewhat comprehensible ASCII
cleartext.  Since the footprints claim to be IPC conformant, maybe a
Perl script coule be used to convert them to gPCB format?

Of course, John Luciani's massive collection of footprints already
sets the standard for gPCB, so maybe we don't need these other
footprints at all!

Stuart