A fabrication package is a stack of single-purpose files. Each Gerber file describes exactly one layer of the finished board, and each layer type has one job: copper conducts, solder mask insulates and protects, silkscreen informs the humans, solder paste feeds the assembly process, and the outline defines where the board ends. Confusing the types…
Ask a fab what files they want and the answer, in most of the world, is Gerber. But there is another name in the conversation — IPC-2581 — and the two represent genuinely different philosophies of how to describe a printed circuit board to the people who will manufacture it. Gerber X2 describes the board…
Gerbv has been viewing Gerber files for a quarter of a century. The project — a free, GPL-2.0-or-later viewer for Gerber RS-274X, Excellon drill and CSV pick-and-place files — was registered on SourceForge on August 19, 2001 as part of the gEDA family, and its official home today is the gerbv/gerbv repository on GitHub, where…
Every Gerber file, however complex the board, is drawn with a surprisingly small kit of tools. Those tools are called apertures, and understanding them unlocks a lot of otherwise mysterious viewer behaviour: why one pad looks crisp and another looks wrong, why a file’s statistics list shapes you never placed, and what the aperture-usage report…
Every fabrication package contains one file that is not like the others. The Gerber files describe the board’s printed layers — copper, mask, legend, paste — but the holes are specified somewhere else: in a separate drill file, most often in Excellon format. If Gerber files are pictures of layers, the drill file is a…
Open a fabrication ZIP from someone else’s project and you may find a small museum of naming habits: board.gbr, board.gtl, board.gbs, something.art, something.pho, and a drill file with no obvious label at all. None of these extensions change what is inside — a Gerber file is a Gerber file — but each carries a clue…
If you have exported Gerber files in the last decade, you have probably met both names — sometimes as alternatives in the same dialog, sometimes used as if they were rivals. They are not rivals. RS-274X is the classic Gerber format: a complete description of one board layer as an image, drawn with apertures. Gerber…
