How are *official* schematics presented?

It changes the line widths? Hmm. With Eagle that never changes no matter what the resolution is set to. I usually print 300dpi. Sometimes 600 or

1200, mostly when there are chips with small embedded graphics in there, to show internal functions.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

[snip]

Of course: 150dpi means a "wire" is 6.67mil

Likewise 300dpi gives 3.33mil

Plus MicroSim Schematics has the ability to size the line widths for each type of drawing element.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Eagle does that automatically :-)

Yep, same here. You could even use it to create all kinds of non-electrical artwork. Haven't done that yet but some day maybe I'll re-design our customized Yahtzee score sheets.

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

[Cough] Some tools let you enter a physical width for your wires, you know. :-)

Granted, since Microsim started... what?... more than 20 years ago, it can be forgiven if it doesn't have that feature.

Did you ever play enough with ORCAD capture to notice that lines of a given width in the symbol editor are rendered as a significantly different (like,

2x!) width on schematics? What a piece of junk...

MicroSim Schematics lets you do that. I just happen to like my wires

6.67mil ;-)

I kissed off OrCAD this last "maintenance" round. Since I'm a "saver" I reviewed five years of e-mail bitches to PSpice "support"... people who shall remain nameless who promised fixes, assigned PCR's to keep me thinking something was happening... NOTHING was fixed. And these last few rounds they've made every effort to emasculate PSpice (MicroSim) Schematics... though they're not very good at even accomplishing that ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I'm always amazed at how many "easy to fix" bugs remain in products year after year... just stupid stuff, like the ORCAD capture line width rendering bug I mentioned. It's not like the GUI portion of the tool is rocket science...

This is one of the reasons I switched to Cadsoft. They run several newsgroups (real ones, accessible via this here newsreader...). Employees of that company actually come online for help, take suggestions and they even run separate suggestion NGs in at least two languages. And they do listen. Best of all, after we all sent in our electronic "Dear Santa" letters quite a few of the suggestions have either already made it into new releases or are now on the roadmap for the next release. Such as my pet peeve, lack of additional part fields that I am missing so much from my OrCad days. They announced that it's a good idea and that they'll do that. Now that's customer service. Ok, sometimes wishes are declined, such as mine for hierarchical sheet structures. A rather serious shortcoming IMHO but they are of different opinion. Oh well, nothing is perfect.

Also, this SW is quite open. There is fully documented user language programming and scripting. So if you need something unorthodox to happen you can write a kolstad.ulp routine and it'll do that. Many times all it takes is a look at their download area. Chance are someone else needed the same thing and has shared a ULP routine.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

Remember that PDF is basically a compressed subset of Postscript, i.e. it is capable of vector graphics, whereas PNG is a raster format. Drawings will always be smaller (and better looking) in vector form, because raster compression can't deal with sharp line-type patterns.

That is just a quirk of the Eagle export module.

Of course. It's been standard for some 15 years now and has pretty much replaced GIF.

robert

The size of a PDF (as pure vector graphics without embedded pixmaps) doesn't depend on resolution. Or, expressed differently, resoultion of the output device is an alien concept to vector graphics.

robert

As long as we're talking about Eagle; no, it's the crappy PS export that does it. I've looked into the generated postscript: Each and every line in your schematics (and that includes all those little bits of the vector fonts) is not only drawn as a line, but also as a box around that line.

Interestingly the CAM processor does a somewhat better job (on schematics as well).

Someone also wrote a eagle2ps ULP script avaliable from CadSoft's download section.

Be aware of the fundamental difference between vector graphics (PS, PDF), raster graphics (TIFF, GIF, PNG) and lossily compressed raster graphics (JPEG) as well as the fact that both PS and PDF can contain embedded raster graphics (like when trying to make a PDF from a TIFF). On top of that, TIFF is only a container format that can embedded data compressed in one of several ways, including no compression at all.

Schematics are, by their very nature, vector graphics (including fonts, which are also vector graphics), so a good postscript exporter (which Eagle doesn't have) would make an excellent job of them. On the other hand, schematics are also 99.9% empty white space, which is why they compress excellently when treated as raster graphics.

robert

No, the problem was the PS from which the PDF was created. Unless you made the PDF from a raster image, which is always inferior.

robert

Oh, they actually have a different opinion? That's be interesting to hear. What I don't like is how they handle nets that go across several sheets -- just with labels things can go horribly wrong. We'd need those tags that really stay attached to their nets, with the text actually being the name of the net to which they're attached.

Yes, just yesterday I noticed that on a four-page schematic I was working on I had somehow managed to get completely unrelated nets connected together. A script hacked up in 10 minutes that listed all nets that had several disjoint and unlabeled sections took care of that.

robert

Mere user unfriendly, minimally useful, unreliable, and popular does not quite get there. For truly evil software you have to be required for the task, truly obtuse to understand, never save any of ten or more separate required data entries per run, and then when the user makes an error fails destructively to data to previous successful executions. This class is called user vicious.

--
 JosephKK
 Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.  
  --Schiller

MS Word will import them if you get the right filter, and change .hpgl suffix to .hgl

Regards Ian

Thanks. That is a good hint. Got to try that.

In some formats (PNG and TIFF) Eagle does produce really small files that are excellent for a client who wants to create a large printout for lab bench work.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

That is impressive. I use Pulsonix when I can and ORCAD/PADS when I have t; I don't bother trying to get Cadence or Mentor to fix anything in their software anymore -- it just isn't worth the effort. Pulsonix is pretty good about fixing bugs and adding features... I was reading through the release notes for their latest version (4.5) last night when I realized, "Hey... there's actually a *lot* here that I had specifically asked for!" And while I'm sure I often wasn't the only person asking for various features, their response is still impressive.

Probably just to tick me off :-) they also went and killed pretty much all the bugs I had found and posted to the Yahoo! support group. They did add a few new ones in the process, but overall it's becoming a really nice package they've already fixed a couple of the new ones. They don't seem quite as "communicative" as you suggest Cadsoft is -- only on infrequent occasion will they post to the Yahoo! group, and almost always under an anonymous "Pulsonix Support" alias, but it appears they read pretty much everything that goes on there.

The only "big" feature I think they're missing relative to Eagle is a scripting language. Many people, including Pulsonix's biggest cheerleader, Leon Heller, have asked for it, so I imagine will show up someday. Pulsonix is a heavy user of the Microsoft .Net "technologies," so unfortunately I doubt it'll ever show up in Macs or Linux as Eagle does.

I'd probably have taken a serious look at Eagle when I found Pulsonix if it hadn't been that I wanted a SPICE package as well: Pulsonix bundles SI-Metrix as their SPICE engine, which I had been favorably impressed with back in grad school.

---Joel

Other times Eagle is overly "complainatory". On the design I finished on Tuesday it flagged errors because I had connected VCC, VDD and V+. Had to, because of various inherent power pin names in the chips I used. When disconnecting, of course, it flagged missing connections. AFAIK the only way to cure that at present is to "invoke", making power pins visible, and then conecting them with a minimum piece of wire. Doesn't look good on a busy schematic.

Oh well, since I don't do layouts and they are done on another system anyhow I have the luxury of being able to ignore error messages :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

No direct SPICE link. OTOH I didn't have that with OrCAD (DOS) either. My work is mostly analog and there, quite frankly, SPICE often doesn't cut it. Correctly modeling a non-ideal RF transformer, noise in a laser module, ultrasound transducer behavior and stuff like that would take much longer to do than rigging it all up in the lab and having a look. That's what we are going to do again on Monday ;-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com