3D view shows silkscreen to be printed on pads - is this correct?

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Please see image below but basically I get a lot of “Silkscreen clipped by solder mask” warnings when I do my DRC and when I checked the 3D view I see the silkscreen is being printed onto the pads (see J1-J4 which are my own custom parts and C5). Is this 3D view correct?

Surely this is an incorrect view because the Gerbers would not have silkscreen printed over the soldering pads?

Thanks.

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The 3D view is correct. The gerbers are exported as you tell them. There’s an export time option to remove the silkscreen print from maskless areas, but you should rather move the reference designators. That’s a basic job while finalizing a layout. Make the Silk layer active, use Layer Display options, layer visibilities and selection filter to make recognizing the silk texts, mask openings etc. easier and to make selecting and moving the texts easier.

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To add a little more context, often the fab will remove this overlapping silkscreen, so you may have seen that before and gotten used to that — but this is not guaranteed and you shouldn’t be relying on them to do it. The text should be arranged so it can print on top of the soldermask.

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Thanks all for making this clear to a n00b. I have got rid of all my warnings and dodgy silkscreen now.

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I can confirm that the fab won’t always remove, nor will always flag this. I once received boards that not only had silkscreen on pads, but also had overhanging silkscreen (from Berg headers) from one board on the next board from the fabricator’s penalization process. They didn’t even flag it to me to make sure that I was OK with the issue… This was a long time ago and my bosses weren’t happy with the problem because at that time each spin of the board resulted in a $200 per layer NRE fee. I don’t recall the resolution though.

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Offtopic… I have always wondered what this penalization process in PCB manufacturing is… maybe it’s what you experienced? They penalized you?

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Just a case of tangled fingers when typing. Funny call-out though. :rofl:

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i’ve had numerous fabs decide to penalize instead of panelize, unfortunately for the sake of professionalism i shan’t name them in public :upside_down_face:

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