How are *official* schematics presented?

Perfect! Then that's really all I need for sending an extra copy of the schematic. I've seen one that I had sent a long time ago when visiting a client. They had printed it out for the lab, the size of wallpaper. Crisp sharp lines, no fuzzy edges anywhere.

I'm sure you might feel differently if you could build an LM324 out of discrete transistors for less than the cost of buying one pre-packaged.

And I suspect you might have tried, at some point.

:-) :-) :-)

In general there's a balance to how much SPICEing vs. bench testing one would do to maximize productivity, I think. I wouldn't want to try to build noise models for lasers either! ...yet clearly it wouldn't make sense for Jim to go and build his amplifiers out of discrete parts anymore.

---Joel

Oh yeah! But mostly that was when I needed less than what an opamp contains or when I couldn't make good use of the remaining three sections, in which case even a LM324 does get expensive. The single and dual packs aren't always that economical. Sometimes a lone transistor can do the job.

True. For chip designs we have used SPICE and other sims to the point where once a Pentium (the first version) blew out. We smoked it.

PNG is pretty widely accepted. Most modern image viewers handle PNG. Web browsers handle PNG. Microsoft Word 2000 and OpenOffice handle PNG.

Joerg, If you want to print your schematics to PDF, get a free PDF print driver. When printing your schematic, instead of selecting a printer, select the PDF printer. I use PDFCreator, but there are many out there that work well since they all use GhostScript. I like PDFCreator since you can print to many different formats (PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, ...) and it can queue jobs so a couple different print jobs can be combined into a single PDF file. It's free and uses GhostScript.

That is great. The PNG files from Eagle look really nice when magnified.

Good idea. Don't know if Eagle will like it though. I have that one bug in Eagle that is really weird. On the first print attempt of the day nothing happens. No error messages, nada. Then I have to select another printer and click back to the one I want and from then on it works. Every day.

Anyone with firefox or internet explorer can... and there's a bunch of other tools too, but unless done at a really high resolution what looks good onscreen looks crap on paper, that's why vector formats (ps,pdf,etc) are often preferred.

Bye. Jasen

Actually, small PNG of under 100K per schematic page print very nicely out here. Even when printed in B-size or larger.

Please remember, HPGL was originally about how to talk to pen plotters and have text fonts, and filled shapes.

My memory of the development of postscript is that it is a page description / layout language oriented around text with some pictures and a few lines. It was the final pre-press output for the CSULB school newspapers in the 1980's. PostScript was not created as a vector drawing language the way i remember it.

Please see:

I know, but is was (is?) a very nice file format. Used it a lot when I was young.

Sure does, in the CAM processor. Three flavors of it (HPGL, HPGL2, HPGLX).

robert

You remember 80% wrong (see the Introduction of above text. 4 out of 5 features listed there are about vector graphics).

robert

Well, yeah, but I want to export only the schematic. To be honest I have never used the CAM processor because I do not do layouts.

Don't be so shy. Note that the CAM button is also active in the schematic editor. Go ahead and press it. See schematics layers available for selection. See all HPGL options available. See also a PS output device that actually does a somewhat better (although far from perfect) job than the printing driver.

robert

Ok, did that. To my surprise, two things happened: The HPGL file ended up being a whopping 1.1MB. Ouch. Then I found that the "new and improved" MS-Word cannot read HPGL any longer. What a progress...