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GerbMagic is:
1. A free Gerber
and Protel PCB viewer. It supports Gerber RS-274x and Protel ASCII PCB file
formats (from Protel 1.57 to Protel 2.8) .
2. An extremely accurate vector converter from Gerber
RS-274x and Protel ASCII PCB to
Adobe
(TM) PDF and PostScript(TM) format.
3. A fast, high-resolution software RIP (raster image processor) for Gerber
RS-274x and Protel ASCII PCB.
GerbMagic converts Gerber and Protel ASCII PCB into TIFF, BMP (Windows Bitmap)
and RID.
Up to 30,000 DPI has been tested with excellent performance.
With the advent of cheap and extremely fast personal
computers, high-resolution vector laser plotters are gradually being replaced by raster laser plotters. Raster Image Processing (RIP) can now be done by inexpensive computer software instead of expensive specialized hardware.
With GerbMagic, you can group a lot of Gerber
and Protel files into a single page. You can move, rotate, mirror, and toggle polarity of each
image on the page as you like. The new page can then be saved as PDF or PostScript format, remaining as vector image, or being directly rasterized into
TIFF(Packbits), BMP or RID format.
RID (Raster Image Data) is
one of the black-and-white
raster image file formats used by GerbMagic to store rasterized images. RID
is a format simpler than bmp and tiff, but with high compression
ratio. Thus the same Gerber or PCB file, when converted into RID, is much more smaller than its
BMP equivalent. At extremely high resolution, it's even better
than TIFF(Packbits). Using RID is much more faster than using BMP. See RID specification for more details.
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