Diptrace copper pour problem

[evading]

I have a small problem with printing from DipTrace. The copper pours comes out with lines in them. If i export my design to gerber, I don't see them. But then if I print from the exported gerbers I see them again.

I saw the same thing on the rendering of a board that I ordered from OSHPARK, but it was not present on the board when I got it.

Any ideas how to solve this so I can do prototyping at home with a UV box or the like?

Einar

[alanb]

Are you sure its not your printer? Try printing a solid block of colour from another application and check if that has lines in it.

[evading]

I'm positive it's not the printer. Exporting the same PCB from Diptrace to BMP and then printing the BMP gave a totally black pour. The problem then was to scale the BMP when printing.

I have noted that the phenomenon changes a little when messing about with the "Line Width" and the "Line Spacing" of the pour but I can never get it to go away.

Einar

[akis]

Maybe the printer drivers or some setting in DIPtrace. What application did you use to print out the .bmp file?

[presoonjohn]

I too have the same problem.

I have installed CutePDF to print the output from Diptrace to PDF. The same happens with the PDF files too...

There are raster lines visible.

[Royce]

When I was making my own circuit boards with Diptrace I would generally just print directly to the laser printer and it was fine.

Anyway, to solve the scale problem for BMP export, maybe just introduce some scaling marks that you can directly measure on the printout to make sure it is correct. A "RR" in the copper (Reads-Right) is also a good thing to have to more easily identify mirrored layouts.

[Connoiseur]

I too faced those problems on my old laptop that did not have a dedicated graphics card, but my new laptop, which has dedicated 2GB of graphics memory and I don't see them anymore.
So, most probably it is due to the rendering limitation of the graphics card and not a software problem. Try opening the pdf files in a different software, even google chrome comes handy at times (just paste the file path in place where you enter url).
Hope that was useful.