Can you explain the difference in data of the files I sent you. Is it possible to reduce the size of the top_mask gerber?

Posted over 10 years ago by Numerical Support Team

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Numerical Support Team

Can you explain the difference in data of the files I sent you. The Mask Layer from FAB 3000 is 15 MB

The file topmask is : 74 KB

The file top_mask is : 15,292 KB !!!

topmask is the file from our PCB manufacturer.

top_mask is a file I created using FAB3000.

My system gets very slow using those big data files.

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Numerical Support Team posted over 10 years ago

Thanks for your answer,

So these drawn Pads are responsible for the large files.

I looked in the gerber generator of my PCB lay-out tool (Mentor Pads) and found a way to produce polylines instead of raster filled areas

This result in much smaller output files.

Thanks !!!

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Numerical Support Team posted over 10 years ago

Thanks for contacting me and sending sample files.

Please view the following screen capture:
https://numericalsoftware-update.s3.amazonaws.com/tutorials/2016-02-10_8-26-03.pdf

Here's the text from the screen capture:

The Cyan Layer (overlapping topmask.gbr) is the larger file. If you notice all pads are "line filled" which is extremely inefficient and results in huge files.

Using FAB 3000 you can convert those drawn pads to flashes and that would reduce file size by 100X.

However more importantly would be to determine how there files were generated with line files and eliminate it at the source - so that you would not need to repeat unnecessarily having to convert drawn pads to flashes.

Thanks again, and I look forward to hearing from you.

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