Piers,
Why are you creating a pdf ? You can print directly from eagle.
3v0
--- On Sun, 9/6/09, Piers Goodhew <piers@...> wrote:
From: Piers Goodhew <piers@...>
Subject: Re: [Homebrew_PCBs] Eagle (Mac) print quality
To: Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sunday, September 6, 2009, 11:36 AM
On 05/09/2009, at 7:06 AM, Daniel Johnson wrote:
> Interesting problem.
>
> Try loading the eagle PDF into inkscape and have a look at it.
Well, if it looks fine in Illustrator (and Preview) I'm pretty
confident the PDF does not have whatever it is that the direct to-
printer. What I did notice only when I'd uploaded the images (made
much more obvious by the scanner's auto-sharpen) is that every fill is
offset a little to the lower left to the outlines ...
I did try eagle -> PDF -> some other app -> Print and ... the smear is
gone, although something else has happened to drill holes - I'm lucky
enough to have Illustrator, I think I'll be sticking to that route!
> I make solder paste stencils by printing the tcream layer in eagle.
> Next I load it into inkscape and then switch to the outline view.
> The files is saved as a SVG and then cut on a critcut machine.
>
> A PCB like the one in your example can be easily cut. I am still
> working on finer pitch parts like TQFP.
That would be nice, but it also etched just fine, my first flirtation
with 10mil traces and running things under SMD parts. Infuriatingly, i
managed to break a trace with the drill chuck ...
PG
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