Our long-time PADS guy left to start a new life, and we're breaking in a replacement.
It's going well, except for this annoyance: we used an old board as the basis for a new one, with a big ECO, saving the outline, mounting holes, and most of the power supply stuff. Works fine, renamed and saved as a new design. But the fab and assembly drawings still show the old design name at the lower-left, and we can't find the menu item that might allow us to change this. The PADS docs and HELP are of course no help.
We're running Logic and PCB version 5.0.
This isn't a problem in schematic printouts, since there the design name comes out as a pleasing string of heiroglyphics.
I'm not a PADS guy, but Allegro. Is it possible it has been "collapsed" and is no longer text? It might be a bunch of lines. I do that with drawings just so it's hard to change the titles and such.
This would be a good question to post on the PADS forum, but I think you can change the name of the design when you "Run" the "Print/Plot" menu, and there is a little text box for job name.
Otherwise, you can just export the design to an ASCII file and find the offending text, change it, and ASCII import back in.
I have PADS2004sp2. I think it worked the same with its predecessor, 5.x.
If you had a newer version this might not work. Every time they fixed one bug, they introduced a few more "features" and a whole sackful of new bugs.
Thanks: it turns out that you have to save the project and re-open it... it's that simple. Our new pcb person had kept the job open for days, without a save-as!
We dropped PADS support at V5. Pads 5 is essentially perfect, so all Mentor could do is break it. When they started offering courses to help experienced Logic users to use the new rev of Logic, we figured it was time to bail.
But Mentor Graphics wants you to use their new and WONDERFUL DX Designer instead of that crappy old Logic ! It's so much easier and works so seamless with PADS PCB !! NOT !!
Just pay the $3,000 per year or whatever so you can call them on the phone everytime you have a problem that isn't obvious or isn't in the manual.
I like pads and logic myself, but Mentor does not want anyone to use Logic anymore for some very stupid reason. Thety obviously don't use their own software (which they acquired and didn't write themselves).
I use Eagle nowdays. It's priced well and there are LOTS of other users on the net and lots of libraries AND free news.server continuing support. That's what I like. Not quite as good as Pads in some ways, but getting better all the time and they seem to listen to their users. Some of their features I like better than PADS like the pan and zooming.
Except it doesn't allow hierarchical sheet structures. That is IMHO a huge disadvantage of Eagle. This input has been given many times over in the forums but Cadsoft did not listen to that one. I am using Eagle myself right now but only because I haven't found a viable alternative.
gEDA is rather strange with the power pins in multi-part packages. Kicad does that nicely but has a raggedy looking title block and coordinate frame, both of which cannot be customized well and cannot be removed at all by the user.
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Regards, Joerg
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Can you dance around their klutzy frame and title block by ignoring them and putting your own smaller frame inside their frame, and then running some postscript postprocessing to crop down to what you want?
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That's what I want to try next because it seems there is no interest in the gEDA community to look at the power pin issue and none in the Kicad community to look at the frame thing. I'd love to write corrected code myself by I am not a programmer. Being a hardware guy it's tough to figure out PS postprocessing, could use some more mainstream file format and do a crop by hand. Won't be very precise though.
If I have my druthers I'll fire up the old OrCad SDT. It was perfect but didn't do zoom, print and stuff too well in a DOS window. I'll have to see if it's better in a virtual machine with a clean native DOS on there. Printing will probably remain an issue.
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Regards, Joerg
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You can probably do similar hacking on gerber files.
With postscript, you can probably print stuff with something as simple as cat fixit-stuff.ps bad-stuff.ps | lpr where fixit.ps is a few lines of magic that redefines the coordinate system. (The old border just falls through the cracks.)
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I don't see any entries in the Features Request that contain "frame" or "title," so it looks like nobody has actually initiated that yet:
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I'm stuck with VS 2005 on the machine (it won't uninstall) and the Kicad page does have a link to a "how to build from source" so I may give it a go this weekend. At least enough to take a look at it. Who knows, it might be easy! ;-)
I still use SDT386+ as my primary schematic tool. With macros and a keyboard with the function keys on the left side of the keyboard, this is a very efficient way of designing. SDT386+ and PCB386+ drivers have been constantly upgraded over the past 12 years outside of Orcad.
The biggest improvement: you don't need a real DOS environment anymore. SDT & PCB now run in a real window in W2k, XP, and supposedly Vista. A team effort by two people created video drivers so SDT and PCB make real Windows graphics calls. One guy wrote VESA drivers in assembly and another guy recoded in C, then created the GDI drivers.
As for printing, all my schematics are printed out to PDF which makes them searchable. My work colleague wrote a tricky batch file which automatically resizes any size drawing to a paper space of your choice using Ghostscript. I modified an Open Office font which creates text that closely matches what you see on the screen. To print a schematic file to PDF is one command line batch file.
If you like printing to laserjet printers, there are drivers available to do that.
If you need a GIF drawing to paste the schematic in a document, there are conversion tools available to do that or you can convert your PDF to bit map.
Want to stack a bunch of pins on top of another? Composer has been modified to allow that which is useful for FPGA parts with dozens of power and ground pins. 27 ground pins only require one pin space on the schematic.
All this can be found on
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. There are a bit over
300 members. The files section has new drivers and exe files to support modern methods. Plus, there are a few dozen people who actively use SDT and PCB on a daily basis which provide good information on use and setup of old DOS Orcad.
If your customer wants Capture formated files, Capture imports SDT files, and does a good job at it if its version 7 or newer.
SDT's back-end processing is so open that you can write your own netlist formaters which we have done to support our PCB tools. The intermediate ASCII netlist file that SDT spits out can be converted to a netlist format of your liking.
Wow, thanks, Mark. I did not know that new drivers had been written. My version is SDT-III so I'll have to look around on the Yahoo group again, maybe it can be resurrected. Now where are those disks ... oops, would be 5-1/4" ... now where's that old 5-1/4" drive ...
This would be cool. Back then I thought OrCad SDT was the best thing since pivot irrigation.
That would be an issue since not all printers are HP-LJ compatible anymore. But if one can print to PDF that problem goes away. Yeehaw!
OrCad always put out nice bitmaps. In fact I did fully integrated docs in MS-Word as early as 1989. Back then it was HPGL though and AFAIK MS-Word has lost the ability to import that.
Yes, some clients would like Capture files.
OrCad has always been great with customizing. Then they were bought :-(
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Regards, Joerg
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I'm pretty sure that the new display drivers won't work under SDT-III, only SDT386+. Boy, version 3 really goes back in time! I think I still have a 5.25" floppy in my home machine for resurrecting those old projects.
It does go way back. In those days it was a rather young program, just a few years old. Other than a minor printer driver glitch I found the software to be bug-free. Amazing.
The driver glitch could be fixed if you wrote your own from a set of generic routines which did not come with the package. So I called. Forgot that I was nine time-hours away from Oregon but someone picked up anyhow. "No, I am only cleaning up here but give me your address and I'll place your request on an engineer's desk". No call back. Hmm. The week after an airmail letter showed up, with a disk in there. Exactly what I needed, allowed me to fix my printer problem. Now that was customer service at its best.
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It's The Brat, and she had to learn PC layout in one week, the only overlap with our guy who was leaving. That's a lot of stuff to cram into one week.
She's finished one board, a little thing I threw together as a practice project she could get done before he left. It's a gain-100, DC- 1.5 GHz amplifier in a little box, with some hooks for use as a photodiode amp and maybe an active signal pickoff. We're sending it out for board fab today; if it works maybe we'll press release it as a product.
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