They have also updated the Gerber spec a few times this year (now at rev J4) which fix a lot of ambiguities and bad practices from Gerber writers. Of which Easy-PC generated Gerbers are guilty of.
It is about time that No1 updated the Gerber output to at least meet the latest J4 standard. It's going to be a while before Gerber readers and manufacturing are implementing the X2 standard.
If Easy-PC generated Gerbers are guilty of "ambiguities and bad practices" then it would be useful to hear about them. Our support database currently has no entries relating to Gerber format issues at present. Could this be a case of users finding issues but the information not making its way back to us?
I'll raise a few 'enhancement' requests David. I've only discovered them as I'm writing a Gerber import plugin for an application at the moment and I'm having to put in conformance checking for the items now listed as Obsolete or Mandatory in the latest specs.
Gerber X2 is backward compatible and therefore old software not supporting X2 can still generate the correct data. Number one should avoid deprecated commands in the future. Most PCB manufacturers don't accept Gerber X2 files at the moment. But that will change soon.
There is another issue with this, Ucamco has made it's own upgrade to Gerber RS-274-X to X2 but few other CAD packages use the X2. Most have used IPC2581 either as well or instead of. The strange thing is Ucamco is a member of IPC2581. But EasyPC is one of the few that does not appear to use IPC2581 and as this appears to be a future standard (Ucamco is trying to gain support for X2 at the moment), would it not be a good idea to provide IPC2581 support as well as X2?
Gerber X2
Posted - 03 Dec 2014 : 14:38:03
