The Heart of Open Source PCB Inspection

Gerbv was originally developed as one of the utilities affiliated with the gEDA project, the free electronic design automation suite. It filled a simple need: a cross-platform way to look at the Gerber files an EDA tool produces, without tying verification to an expensive proprietary suite.

The project was first registered on SourceForge in 2001. Its historical SourceForge page records a rating of 4.6 out of 5 from 26 ratings and 1,247,968 all-time downloads — figures that describe the project’s long history on SourceForge, where releases stopped in the 2.3.0 era. Current releases are published on GitHub instead.

Today Gerbv is separately maintained from gEDA. Its core parsing, rendering and export code also lives in libgerbv, a library intended to let developers build their own tools on Gerber parsing and rendering.

Open Code

Gerbv is written in C and its source is public. Anyone can read how a file is parsed and rendered instead of trusting a black box with sensitive design data.

No Subscriptions

Gerbv is free software under GPL-2.0-or-later. There is no licence server, account or monthly fee for viewing your own fabrication files.

Runs Locally

Gerbv is a native desktop application (GTK 2 with Cairo rendering). You inspect files on your own machine rather than uploading them to a web service.

Honest Limits

Gerbv views RS-274X, Excellon and CSV pick-and-place files and exports PNG, PDF, PS, SVG and DXF. It does not support RS-274D, has no 3D view and no design-rule checking, and its editing is limited to selecting and deleting objects, format conversion and command-line panelization.