Negative Silkscreen

[jsantosrico]

Hi,

I’m trying to get a negative silkscreen, where the text is etched out of the silkscreen, instead of the usual way. Think of Arduino.

I’ve found this post (Arduino style reverse silkscreening), and I’m trying to follow it, but for the life of me, I can’t get the silkscreen into the mask layer . I attach a video of my process. Am I doing something wrong?

2018-08-01_0941

I tried to swap other layers too, but I can only make it work with copper layers. If if only works with copper, why do you have the option to select other layers? I tried Kicad 4 and 5.

[pedro]

How can I write text in solder mask?

Update: please support this as a feature request in KiCad here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1783249. I’d like to write text in solder mask by using the F.Mask layer. However, there seems to be no way to make this a negative. In other words, I can easily add text to the F.Mask layer, but that leaves solder mask as the background and makes the text now uncovered copper, but what I want to do is the opposite: I’d like to leave the background as uncovered copper and make the text solder m…

[bobc]

I created a further test case to show negative text in the silkscreen:

1. Place text you want to render as negative on ECO1 layer
2. Place zone fill in same position on silk layer to create the background
3. Generate gerbers
4. Use gerber_combine to subtract ECO1 from silkscreen generating a new silk file