Re: Gerbers from EDA

Peter Bennett wrote:

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:23:14 GMT, Robert Baer
<robertbaer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Peter Bennett wrote:



All Gerbers that I send to a board shop are as viewed from the
component side of the board - even those for the solder side of the
board. Any lettering I put on the board will be readable on the
finished board, so lettering on the solder side is mirrored in the
design program (Protel).




So Protel "automatically" mirrors the top side when it makes that gerber, but the actual file is normal reading?



No. When working on the board layout in Protel (or most other CAD
programs, I think), you are looking at the component side of the
board. All the Gerber files Protel produces are also oriented as if
you are looking at the component side (with X-ray vision, for the
bottom and inner layers.) No mirroring involved.

When the board shop processes the Gerbers to produce their
manufacturing tooling, they may mirror some layers - (I recall a
requirement to have the film emulsion against the board for best
resolution - don't know if that still applies, or exactly what steps
the board shop uses to get from Gerber file to their tooling)

Your answer seems to be the norm.
What has been frustrating, is that i have had to tell my EDA to X-mirror the top side and that resulted in a normal-reading (!) gerber.
And i finally got very curious and did all 4 variations mentioned, with the gerbers never matching in any of the mirror requests.
Rather messy..
.