Homebrew PCBs

On 6 Sep 2009, at 13:29, Piers Goodhew wrote:

> Uh, yeah, but the entire point of my post is that the direct printing
> is strangely smeared - that's what the pictures are of. Interested to
> see if it's just a mac thing, or a me thing.
>
> PG

I would say it is a mac thing at the moment. I have Eagle 5.6.0 and  
Mac OSX 10.5.8.

As far as I knew pretty well all printing on the mac is accomplished  
by generating postscript (a PDF) and then sending that to the printer.  
Thus a preview is a PDF file.

I took a simple board, suppressed all layers except the pads and  
printed out the board.

The 'smearing' you see looks like the fill and the outline are  
misaligned for the holes in the pads. No idea yet which is in the  
right place or what to do about it but I thought I would drop in a  
message to say you are not alone or seeing things.

Then, to double check, I printed straight to a PDF. Twice, once for  
each printer I have. In both cases the generated PDF is correct and  
shows no alignment issues.

I can't find anything about this on the Cadsoft newsgroups at the  
moment.

Now I come to look at it, the process of printing on OSX for Eagle is  
downright odd. Both printer setup and Print have horribly overlapping  
functionality.

Pete Harrison
www.micromouseonline.com