Nigel,

    I'm glad you chimed in on this from "the other side of the pond".  :-)  It give another perspective for sure. As far as the ODB++ Viewer goes, you should work to get better at it not because you would switch over to ODB++, but for the learning side of it. We use to use GC-Preview until they starting charging for it and I would have been more than happy to get that funded since it is such an easy tool to use, but we had GerbTool at the company and it would have been a harder sell for GC-Preview. That said, I never cared for GT but after working with it, I find it pretty easy to use and I'll admit, there are some real pain in the shorts things about it I wish they would change, but I've gotten used to it now and it's OK. (In my opinion, there is a ton more setup to do, but...)

    Now on a side note to this discussion, I'd like to add that I'm glad to see others using a 3rd party tool to view their output, be it GERBER, ODB++, or IPC-2581, if you can. This ensures you are sending good data to the vendor and not at least doing a sanity check that the data was good or at least looks like the board you created... I learned that long ago when a vendor's tool would show you one thing and plot another... Trust, but verify... :-) 

I have a saying I like to use for things like that. When the farmer asked the fox how many chickens were in the hen house, the fox replies, 12, just 12, not the 14 you thought" as he spits out some feathers from the side of his mouth.  Have a great Day!

Later...



Scott Decker | Senior Engineer, PCB Design Services CID+ | Electronic Systems Center

COLLINS AEROSPACE

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-----Original Message-----

From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nigel Burtt

Sent: Thursday, April 4, 2019 1:49 AM

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: [TN] [External] [DC] IPC-2581 and ODB++ ... Again



We found much the same polling our approved PCB vendors in UK/EU and far east. 



It used to be the case that PCB vendor front-end (and paste stencil manufacturers) preferred ODB++ over Gerber and even in some cases offered a small financial incentive to have data in that format, but most common data format remains Gerber because that is still what everyone uses.  Chicken-and-egg. ODB++ is certainly a more "intelligent" and complete dataset. No-one was much interested in IPC-2581 at all, so I don't see that gaining traction any time soon at least on this side of the pond.



If the free viewer for ODB++ was easier to use, I'd be much happier to move to that format, but it needs to match the ease of using GC-Prevue and Gerber files and it really doesn't currently!