Re: Gerber print driver

HPL printers speak HPGL, or used to.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back in DOS Orcad times a college of mine did exactly this. It was a matter of just 3 days or so, surprisingly small. I have no idea if RS-274 is so much different.

Stay away from HP-GL in the context of board layouts. Still the anxious eyes haunt me when I can't get no sleep, from these times when I came to the local board house with HPGL. Millions of implementation differences for each plotter.

In my standard Linux Mint distribution there is a Gerber viewer included.

The about-text says this:

what's wrong with a gerber viewer and a printer?

With HPGL, it would be a snap. Problem is, EAGLE only outputs a bastardized vector version of its "fonts". Rasterizing them only makes things worse. If someone got off their dead a* and a) correctly implement all characters and b) EXACTLY echo them in the Gerber (that is to say, do not change them or otherwise F with them), one could get decent labeling. EAGLE has gone thru numerous versions, and there has been ZERO changes/fixes to the"fonts".

gerbv does an excellent job for viewing, and provided you know exactly what you are doing, gerbv is good for editing.