Greetings all, hereby I proudly present the latest addition to the suite of free EDA tools: gerbv available at http://gerbv.sourceforge.net/ As the name implies it's a viewer for Gerber files. The graphical presentation is based on GTK+ and has the possibility to run Guile Scheme as backend for generating other file formats. This release is "release early, release often"-release. What is missing is listed below. The next week(s) work will involve making the build system complete and fix the sourceforge site to a usable state. The aim for the project is to make a free Gerber Viewer that is possible to run on as many platforms as possible. It has been tested on Linux, NetBSD and Solaris. Another goal is also the possiblity to run as much of the Gerber standard as possible. Some excepetions will probably be made with seldom used and hard to implement functions. What is missing: * Make target install not implemented * Backends must be situated in the same directory as executable * Multi quadrant arcs are not drawn (red lines will be drawn) * Aperture macros (red dots shows where should be) * Setting color on layer * Show several files at the same time * Gerbers definition of layers are ignored * Proper documentation on how to interface the backend * Surely other things I currently forgotten What's there: * Parses a lot of Gerbers. Considered usable with the excpetion for the aperture macros. * Panning and zooming * Several files can be loaded and switched between * Different loaded files are shown in different colors * Scheme backend * Disable backend at configuration time if you don't want to install Guile * Start of a simple ps-generating backend Scheme backend : short explanation ---------------------------------- Reading Gerber files are actually split into two parts: 1. parsing 2. drawing When running in batch step 2 is replaced with a call to a Scheme function where inparameters are the parsed information about the read Gerber file. Download -------- Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/gerbv and click Get. Install ------- You must have GTK+ 1.2 (>1.2.3) installed. If you want to run the backend you must also have Guile installed (>1.3.4). If you have the gerbv-0.0.1.tar.gz file in your current directory: 1. gzip -dc gerbv-0.0.1.tar.gz | tar xf - 2. cd gerbv-0.0.1 3. ./configure or ./configure --diable-batch if you don't want Guile backend 4. make 5. Test the program with for example: ./src/gerbv example/nollezappare/EtchLayer2Bottom.gdo Help ---- It is greatly appreciated if to receive gerber files that crash gerbv. Current status of gerbv makes it very probable, because there area so many short cuts and not implemented stuff, so don't expect too much. I will add it to the test suite, so make sure I can do that. If they're you can still send it to me so I can diagnoze gerbv. But I will under no circumstances sign any NDA's or similar. Backends generating different format like TIFF or HPGL. Autoconf hacks for platforms that currently supported. Note that Windoze is not supported at all and will probably never be since there already exists a wast amount of free Gerber viewers to that platform. Thanks ------ The greatest thanks at all goes to Ales; starting up this list and hacking gaf. gaf was a big souorce of information when hacking the GTK+ stuff. I have never hacked graphical GUI's before. The guys at SEUL for hosting this mailing list and the gEDA project.