Printing Top view components wich a smooth gray bottom tracks

Gerardo_Teran_Julio · May 31, 2020, 1:41pm

Is there a way to print the top view of PCB witch the bottom tracks visible. Just like this?:

kenyapcomau · May 31, 2020, 2:11pm

Have you tried turning off layers in the pcbnew print dialog, e.g. leaving BCu and FSilk and a couple of others?

Gerardo_Teran_Julio · May 31, 2020, 2:31pm

Yeah. It prints but full dark bottom layer so tracks cover the text present in top then the printed is ilegible

kenyapcomau · May 31, 2020, 2:48pm

I changed the color of BCu to pale cyan and then selected Color Mode for printing and got the below. I’m sure you can tweak it further.

Gerardo_Teran_Julio · May 31, 2020, 2:59pm

Works. Thank you a lot.

der.ule · May 31, 2020, 3:04pm

I used the plot function to generate SVG and edited the layers visibility in Inkscape, not straightforward, but it works:

kenyapcomau · May 31, 2020, 3:31pm

There are also various Gerber viewers out there including online ones that let you tweak the layer visibility and colors.

Piotr · June 1, 2020, 8:39am

How to do it was my first check before decision to move to KiCad. At first (4.0.6) my decision was that I will be doing it strait from PCB by Exporting to SVG selected layers from PcbNew to SVG. The problem was that flags to on/off references and values didn’t worked when Exporting to SVG. Because of this I decided to have Reference and Value at different layers (and identical boxes for elements at both of them) to allow me for export once with Reference and once with value. This way I had such pictures directly from PcbNew but I had to change colors in PcbNew and it was no simple way to get back (just by for example not saving PCB after exporting), I could save configuration before each exporting and load it back but it was also not good for me as you always just can forgot it (may be in V6 I will go back to direct exporting as there probably you will have a way to save color schemes).
So I changed my mind and now I Plot separate Layers to SVG (here you can on/off Values and References so I moved them to one layer) and mix them in InkScape. In 5.1.5 a problem has arisen when I wonted to print that way the bottom side but in 5.1.6 it is fixed.
My pictures looks like these (gray level is of course up to you):

system · August 30, 2020, 8:39am

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.