Out of curiosity, I took the PDF of your board, captured a BMP from it, inserted it into DipTrace, scaled it to proper size, exported it back out as gerber, loaded it into GC-Prevue, and then captured it as a JPEG. I have done a few basic designs in DipTrace and I could probably re-make your board in ~20 minutes. DipTrace is very easy to learn and I bet you could recreate your board in a couple hours as a new DipTrace user. You can insert what you have done as a picture to use as a reference while creating the board in DipTrace. I would definitely recommend DipTrace as the way to create the board without doing any conversion of your Corel file. I think the best strategy is to export the drawing to a standard format such as PDF or HPGL and find a program that can convert that to Gerber, from which the university's software can convert to the necessary engraving outlines.īut, in the long run, I do hope that John gets up to speed with a bona fide PCB CAD program, since it will boost his productivity over Corel enormously. One could conceivably convert the drawing to a bitmap and use a trace program to create the outline path, but such programs seldom produce clean results, since they are unable to infer the difference between smooth nodes and those that are intended to be corners.

Drawing the traces as closed polygons is what I referred to as 'ridiculous' at best it would be frustratingly tedious. If traces are drawn as thick lines instead of closed polygons, they won't be able to be welded to the pads. So he could try a 'weld' operation and a outline plot, and see what the time cost is, and what the issues are ?Ī weld operation has to occur between two closed curves.

Diptrace pattern editor import dxf