Homebrew PCBs

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:13:47 -0800 (PST), Naveed Alam  
<naveedguy2@...> wrote:

>
> In order to do toner transfer, which format should I use for printing  
> the PCB on the paper?
> Should it be BMP or WMF? Isn't the printing result of a BMP grainy as  
> compared to the filled and continuous result of WMF?

You would need a lossless format. compressed is fine but lossless.
BMP is a raster pixel image, create it at the resolution your printer uses  
and all is well.
WMF is in most cases equivalet vector graphic, but it is a very scary  
format and can just as well be a bitmap. I do not use it.

You could also use .GIF or .PNG if you want low file size. they are  
losless compressed image formats. again use the reaoution of your printer.  
TIFF is another option many PCB programms support, i think it is lossless  
compression too.

I do not really understand why your BMP should be grainy if the resolution  
is right? If you describe the differences more cleary i might be able to  
explain it. maybe send me both images off list (if smaller than 3Mb, maybe  
zip).

> PCB softwares allow me to export to other formats which are not images.  
> Can anyone help me how to get PCB images from these files?

If it exports gerber you can use a gerber viewer to print them. I hope  
there is a free gerber viewer that can print...


> Can I use Electronic
> Workbench for this purpose?
> What is EWB layout, *.PLC?


Don't know anything about that.

ST