Gerber Viewer in short gerbv is a viewer for Gerber files. Gerber files are generated from PCB CAD system and sent to PCB manufacturers as basis for the manufacturing process. The standard supported by gerbv is RS-274X.
The basic difference between RS-274D (the old standard) and RS-274X is basically the addition of apertures in RS-274X. It might be possible to make an RS-274X file out of an RS-274D file and an aperture list.
gerbv also supports drill files. The format supported are known under names as NC-drill or Excellon. The format is a bit undefined and different EDA-vendors implement it different. But basically you need to have the tools definition in the file, then the parser is quite tolerant. The different holes are shown as dots in the (scaled) correct size.
The different layers of the PCB are separated into different files. gerbv can load all files at the same time and display them "on top of each other". You can independently turn them on and off.
Requirements:
· GTK+, the graphical toolkit (required).
· GDK-Pixbuf, export of images (optional).
· libpng, needed by GDK-Pixbuf to generate PNGs (optional).
· getopt_long from the GNU project. gerbv can do without getopt_long long options to the program will hence not be available (optional).
Installation
To install the program do
1. gzip -dc gerbv-1.0.1.tar.gz | tar xf -
2. cd gerbv-1.0.1
3. ./configure
4. make install
Interesting configure options are:
--help : Lists all options
--disable-exportpng : Disable compilation of export of PNGs
--enable-gtk2 : Compile with GTK+ 2 instead of GTK+ 1
--prefix= : Install from dir
--with-maxfiles : Set maximal number of files (default 20).
--enable-unit-mm : Change default unit in status bar to mm from inch.
Product's homepage
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Fixed a minor arc rendering bug in fast mode.
· Make the svg/pdf/ps export use a 1:1 scale instead of scaling to fit the page.
· Always require cairo now since we make use of some of the transformation functions even when using gdk rendering.
· Fix a bug in the vertical scrollbar calculations.
· Fix a bug where apertures < 10 were potentially ignored in some drill files.
· Fix clipping bug when viewing files with image offsets.
· Fix a bug where clicking on the message tab caused the keyboard accelerators stop working.
· Improve the macro parser.
· Allow 0 degree rotation
· Fix some drill parser bugs element.
· Fix some additional Excellon export bugs.
· Fix the pkgconfig file to include some needed dependencies.
· Includes a "layer transformation" dialog window and functionality. Right clicking on a layer in the sidebar and selecting the "modify layer orientation" menu item brings up a dialog box which allows the user to translate/scale/rotate/mirror the layer. When re-saving the layer, all user transformations are saved with the RS-274X file.
Find us on Google+
