silkscreen Help

On 04/07/2011 11:08 AM, Matthew wrote:

...

Some silk screen of your PCBs are too small and their lines are

too thin to print. They'll be printed blur.

 

We recommend that they at least to be composed of 4mil thick line;

at least 25mil high, the only way they can be clearly printed.

As Gary recommended, you must use the "vector" font for anything that

will wind up in a gerber file.  4 mil thick line is pretty thin for a

silkscreen.  I generally use a minimum of 7 mil.

Eagle does not directly provide a way of setting the thickness of a line

used in text.  But an /indirect/ method is available as the ration of

line width to character height.

If you want a 25mil high character, and a 5 mil line width, then you

want the ratio to be set to 5/25, or 20%.

To do this:

1) turn on the layers that will be on your silkscreen

2) Group all objects on the entire board.

3) Smash all the parts in the group.

4) change the font to vector for the group.

5) change the ratio to 20 for the group

From the command line in the board window:

    DISPLAY tOrigins tNames tPlace

    DISPLAY bOrigins bNames bPlace

    GROUP all

    SMASH (>0 0)

    CHANGE FONT vector (>0 0)

    CHANGE RATIO 20 (>0 0)

The board window shows exactly what the text will look like on the

silkscreen.  You can reposition the component names as necessary.

After producing the gerber files, it's always a good idea to use a

gerber viewer to verify correctness.  I use gerbv on linux.

Hope this helps.

Enjoy,

    - Chuck

On 04/07/2011 11:08 AM, Matthew wrote:

...

Some silk screen of your PCBs are too small and their lines are

too thin to print. They'll be printed blur.

 

We recommend that they at least to be composed of 4mil thick line;

at least 25mil high, the only way they can be clearly printed.

As Gary recommended, you must use the "vector" font for anything that

will wind up in a gerber file.  4 mil thick line is pretty thin for a

silkscreen.  I generally use a minimum of 7 mil.

Eagle does not directly provide a way of setting the thickness of a line

used in text.  But an /indirect/ method is available as the ration of

line width to character height.

If you want a 25mil high character, and a 5 mil line width, then you

want the ratio to be set to 5/25, or 20%.

To do this:

1) turn on the layers that will be on your silkscreen

2) Group all objects on the entire board.

3) Smash all the parts in the group.

4) change the font to vector for the group.

5) change the ratio to 20 for the group

From the command line in the board window:

    DISPLAY tOrigins tNames tPlace

    DISPLAY bOrigins bNames bPlace

    GROUP all

    SMASH (>0 0)

    CHANGE FONT vector (>0 0)

    CHANGE RATIO 20 (>0 0)

The board window shows exactly what the text will look like on the

silkscreen.  You can reposition the component names as necessary.

After producing the gerber files, it's always a good idea to use a

gerber viewer to verify correctness.  I use gerbv on linux.

Hope this helps.

Enjoy,

    - Chuck