Hello people it's time for the next release of Gerber Viewer, aka gerbv, the "all files at once"-release. Last release I talked about either fixing GUI or aperture macros. It became GUI. The radio buttons on the side have now changed to colored checkbuttons, which makes it possible to turn on and off different layers. The color on the button reflects the color on the layer. I want to thank my friend Andreas Andersson aka Pitch for actual starting this snowball of changes it became. To be able to see which file is loaded on which button I have implemented tooltips. Hold the mouse marker over a button and a tooltip will pop up, showing the filename. Drill file support is now "embedded". The program now tries to automagically determine wheter the file is a gerber- or drillfile and parse according to this. The -d is hence removed from the command line. If you experience any problem with this, please contact me or Pitch. I have changed how panning is done. This gave a tremendous speed improvment. Now you can pan painless despite you have turned on 19 layers with over 100.000 elements in it. The trick is to just copy pixmaps and not redraw the whole image. Unfortunate I still have to redraw the image when zooming, so that is still slow. Another speed improvments is parsing; by changing file IO I got a speed increase in parsing by two to three times. If you have small and few files you probably won't notice a difference. The only new supported Gerber element is Polygon Area Fill. You can now zoom in and out with middle button resp. middle button plus shift. There are also many bugs removed and some bugs added. The biggest support with ideas, great (in many ways) gerberfiles and bugreports is from Joachim Jansen. A big thanks to him. For next release I think I shouldn't promise anything this time. But with Christmas closing in you never know what pops up... Comments, patches and suggestions are, as always, very welcome. Homepage for gerbv is still http://gerbv.sourceforge.net/ To download gerbv goto http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gerbv/ and grab gerbv-0.0.6.tar.gz To install the program do 1. gzip -dc gerbv-0.0.6.tar.gz | tar xf - 2. cd gerbv-0.0.6 3. ./configure 4. make install Interesting configure options are: --help : Lists all options --disable-batch : Disable compilation of Guile/Scheme backends --prefix= : Install from dir What's new in 0.0.6 - Turn on and off explicit layers. - Color on button reflect color on layer. - Automatic detection of drill- or gerber file. - Tooltips over buttons to reflect loaded filename. - Handles Polygon Area Fill - Major rehacking of file IO and pan code to significantly increase speed. - Autoscaling. Loaded gerber files are automagically scaled and panned to fit in window. Also possible to do with loaded files with Zoom/Fit meny option. - configure.in enhancement to support package building in Red Hat. Thanks to Wojciech Kazubski for patch. - bzero changed to memset, which hopefully is more POSIX (for portability). - Loads of bugs squashed and hopefully fewer added.