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Date:	Sat, 20 Sep 2014 04:13:17 +0200
From:	Bernd Walter <ticso AT cicely7 DOT cicely DOT de>
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Subject:	Re: [geda-help] exporting to eagle et al
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On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 03:47:13AM +0200, Peter Stuge wrote:
> vattan wrote:
> > send files to someone who is not using gEDA, they have Altium and Eagle etc.
> > I assume Eagle would be the easiest to export to
> 
> Interchangeability of working files is not a strong point of any EDA
> software, also not gEDA. Noone uses it much and it's low priority.
> 
> I'd say your only chance is to use the common export formats; like
> gerber and png. Of course Altium or Eagle can't work with them.
> 
> I'm afraid you are a few decades too early.

Easiest would be to have that someone install gEDA, because unlike
Eagle and Altium gEDA is completely free and not picky about the
OS and CPU architecture.
It is even possible to use a cheap Raspberry PI to run gEDA.
I know that Eagle has a limited costless version and Altium recently
annouced something similar, but still those are binaries for specific
systems only and limited in functionality.

> > Does anyone have any insight here?
> 
> Road untraveled, noone has invested resources into making it smooth,
> it is very bumpy. A detour will save you time in the end, unless you
> want to invest significant resources in paving the road before you
> can travel it.

Automatic conversion might even be impossible because features can be
different.
For example with QFN center pad I use a non paste pad overlayed with small
paste pads to reduce paste amount.
This might not be possible to do this way with other software, but other
software likely have solutions for this in another way.
On the other hand you can't just switch component foorprints to native
library versions, because of naming and detail size differences.
Even if you have a tool you can't expect it to do the complete conversion
without help.

In every converion case I know the projects had been recreated.
With board layouts it turned out to be best to have a JPEG or something
like this in background to redraw the copper on top of it.

-- 
B.Walter <bernd AT bwct DOT de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.

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