Eagle. A better Visio than Visio

I could have told you that years ago. Some of the first symbols I made were arrows in different size, for just about that purpose :-)

However, mostly I use it to draw illustrative diagrams for non-tech audiences and that doesn't require off-page referencing.

Cadsoft should have a section titled "Whacky uses of Eagle" :-)

Do you have a way to export good line work into a separate document?

(...)

PDF and Postscript are available and I don't recall installing either one of those separately. The Postscript output is very nice.

--Winston

But Word deosn't like them. At least Visio can export an EMF file, which looks nice in Word.

We do block diagrams, generally the first sheet of a schematic, using Pads Logic, and sometimes we paste that into a manual. I generally use Universal Document Converter to print it to a jpeg or gif, but the line work is mediocre.

Can you export HPGL? Or DXF? Many programs can import that, nicely.

Hi Winston, what version of Visio? (I thought I was running the oldest one left on the planet, version 3.0 '91-'94 Shapeware Corp.)

There are multiple pages in visio, and I like the way it resizes objects. You can open a little dialogue window and resize things in different ways.

Eagle is nice too, just be careful when you generate a board from your file :^)

George H.

(...)

That is an extremely good idea.

--Winston

Yeah, Just now I told Acrobat to save in *.doc format. Open Office couldn't open it properly under either flavor of .doc it is supposed to support. Dang.

For now, I don't mind interleaving hard copy from Open Office and Eagle. It'd be nice to be able to pull .pdf or .ps into Open Office, though.

--Winston

No, those options aren't available, sadly.

--Winston

Hobbyist'.

You win! I'm at 5.0a

If it just would handle curve changes/movements properly and had decent offpage connectors, I'd look at it further. I thought it was miraculous when I first used it.

Not 'Visicalc' levels of miraculous but still pretty cool.

Tell me more! I've made a couple Eagle boards without issues. I need to know if my service bureau was correcting a problem without letting me know what was wrong.

--Winston

Update:

I tried a few other combinations unsuccessfully.

One thing that did work really well was Acrobat to .tif. Open Office opened the .tif file properly.

It looks quite nice even at 2x zoom.

--Winston

Hobbyist'.

I run Visio 2002, which works nicely with XP and Word 2003.

From Eagle I use PNG most of the time because it generates a very small file size. A schematic (or any other sketch for that matter) looks pristine after import into a Word document. Just like in a magazine, and can be sized up and down as needed. Usually I turn colors off because most clients don't use color printers.

The PCB shop? That would be highly unusual although one of the big places has once taken the liberty to "improve" my design. BIG mistake. They ate the cost of another super-fast run because of this.

Usually if they need to change something they put your project on CAM hold and notify you for correction or approval of their fixes.

That's comforting. I've been really pleased with the results from my vendors via any package I've used from Traxedit to Autotrax to Eagle.. (I know I missed a few.) I haven't had a problem.

Hey George, what should I be looking, for when sending my Eagle boards out for fab?

--Winston

Make sure the Gerbers show up clean in a Gerber viewer. I use GC PreView. But only to check other people's layouts because I always farm them out.

Then there's the usual RoHS . They often wanted to dock my clients an extra $500 or so for non-RoHS finish but so far I was always able to negotiate that away for them.

Oh, sorry, it was a joke, you wouldn't make a pcb from your programming flow chart.

George H.

Geesh now I feel bad .... Eagle is just fine. It's what I use.

George H.

Have you considered using Dot? It really works much better than a graphical tool. It's a paradox, but true nonetheless.