Mirroring text & more printing options (2 replies)
You say you only use one side of the board and you use the red layer, well use the green layer for your text and when you go to print, print the top and bottom and silk screen if you wish to get all the referance points. I useally will put the componet value in the red or green and etch in to the copper.
as for having more than one layout on the page, copy and paste it next to and below, may have to pay with how many you can do for propor scaling
Thanks for your reply. You are right with placing the text to the green layer, it works.
I figured out problems with mirroring a duplicating PDF content in Inkscape (freeware), it can edit PDF without problems and export everything to A4 PDF ready for printing.
Hello,
I love this freeware program. It is so simple for basic usage, you don't have to learn anything difficult like Eagle or KiCad.
But I can't figure out how to mirror (flip left to right) a text object placed on the board.
The reason why I need that is that I print the layout first with PDF virtual printer (I use freeware - PDFLite) to a PDF file and then with a laser printer on a glossy magazine paper. Then I use the ironing method plus Iron(III) chloride to get the final copper board. As you can imagine the layout when ironed is flipped and then the text is unreadable. I don't have problems with soldering components as I use the red top layer, so the only problem is the text.
Btw great thing is that when you print the layout to the PDF file, it is fully vectorized (scalable), so you can zoom in without loosing a quality.
But PDF files are very difficult to be mirrored - I don't know any freeware programs or online services capable of doing that (I found one but the PDF file was not a vector anymore, mirrored PDF was a low-quality bitmap). So next great feature would be some checkbox in the Print dialog for mirroring the output.
And the last thing is that when I would like to have the same layout printed more times on the same printed page (PDF). It is also hard to copy the scalable content of the PDF and paste it next to the original content. Reason is the same - it would save me a lot of paper when printing it and I could use the same paper for more copper boards using the same layout. So it would be great if the print dialog could contain this feature.
Thank you very much.