Re: gEDA-user: Two questions about pcb.

["harry eaton" <bumpelo@comcast.net>]

> I designed the fab drawing based on what 4pcb's techs wanted.  It has
> exactly what they asked for - 10 mil outline on centers, drill
> symbols, project info, gerber format.  If you do a gerber without some
> sort of index (this is what the drill symbols are for) it's useless to
> them because they can't correlate it with the other layers (unless you
> tell them to trust the gerber coordinates and skip that validation
> step).
>
> I don't see what a separate route-only gerber would provide.
>
> What I *did* want to do at some point is provide a CNC milling file
> for the board outline, which would let the fab shop skip the tech
> completely.  But, that's a *completely* different problem, as you have
> to figure in bit skew and such.

Many vendors will automatically make the CNC mill file from a gerber
and trust (but verify) that the coordinates line up, the same way they do
with the drill file: load in the CNC file and see if the outline matches
etc.

Of course they can almost as easily extract the path part of the fab gerber
and use that in their CNC file creator. I suppose the simple solution is to
not generate a route gerber unless the vendor asks for it.

h.