David Novak wrote: : Can anyone tell me how to get reference designator information into : GC-Prevue? Whenever I use Jump to Component, I get the message "Can't : find a component called xx", where xx is the reference designator I am : trying to locate.
: It appears that GC-Prevue does not have the reference designator : information that it needs.
GC Prevue is a Gerber viewer. Gerbers are files which tell a photoplotter how to draw lines and shapes. A Gerber file has no independent concept of a component or a refdes. As far as a Gerber file is concerned, the thing which you see as a refdes is just a bunch of lines drawn in one of your files. Therefore, GC Prevue can't jump to a component since it has no concept of what's a component and what is not.
I don't know why GC Prevue has a "jump to component" menu item, but I suppose that if you use a more sophosticated cam file (ODB++ or something like that), then GC Prevue knows what to do. Or maybe if you provide additional information to GC Prevue, then it can understand that a bunch of lines and apertures is really a component. But I don't know how you would input that information into GC Prevue. In any event, plain Gerber is too dumb a file format [1] to hold the information you want.
Stuart
[1] I am not saying that it is a bad or unintelligent file format. Rather, it is "dumb" in the sense that it doesn't hold any more info than simply how to draw lines.