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Dynamic shape with solid fill does not plot solid black

John Davies

We produce photomasks by changing the colors of the desired features to black and using the Plot command. This works well for most of the etch but not for dynamic shapes with solid fills, which print gray instead of black. Connect lines and cross-hatched fills print black but a solid fill does not. The gray is very dark and looks like black in Plot Preview on the screen but emerges distinctly gray from a laserprinter. The darkness varies between printers. Printing to pdf with Distiller gives a shape that looks black on screen but again becomes gray from a printer.

Can anybody suggest how to make the fill genuinely black, please? I am using OrCAD 16.3 on Windows XP.

  •  Why aren't you using Gerber and processing the Gerber film instead?

  • Thanks for the suggestion. We have a "traditional" (i.e. old-fashioned) in-house process for producing PCBs and use the Plot command to produce a photomask directly. I work in a university and this procedure enables us to produce simple PCBs very quickly for students. You're correct, we could write Gerbers and print them instead but it requires several extra steps and hasn't been necessary until we found the problem with shapes.
  • FormerMember
    FormerMember

    Hello,

    The solid plot is possible from PCB Editor directly. You could have enabled OpenGL from main menu Setup->User Preferences->Display->Opengl the disabl_opengl value could be unchecked. Than could be checked value in display_nohilitefont  Setup->User Preferences->Display->Highlight. Last step is setting the number of lines spacing for shape fill Setup->User Preferences->Display->Shape_fill display_shapefill set value 0. It is not clear but might help.

  •  Thanks a lot for this information.

    It works for me too.

    Regards.

  • Hello.

    I use PCB Editor 16.6 and I don't set the number of lines in value 0 in Setup->User Preferences->Display->Shape_fil , I only can enable or disable this parameter.


    Thanks for your help. 

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