Printing from Virtuoso (or printing GDSII)

[Manuel Koch]

I have a problem creating good printouts from Virtuso's layouts for
documentation porposes.

I want vector graphics output OR high resolution bitmap. The problem
with Cadence is that their printing service produces a horrible
mixture of both.
If you have one of the following outputs set up:

- postscript (1,2): you get the outlines of polygons as a vector
graphic and the fill patterns as low-res bitmaps; unfortunately the
fill patterns are not clipped to their corresponding polygons but
merged with all layers and cut in ‘larger squares' afterwards. With
the :residentfonts: option text is preserved as text, but each letter
as a separate object, so you cannot change the size or shape of text
afterwards.
- hpgl: you get only the polygon outlines, no fill patterns;
unfortunately shapes are merged, clipped and stacking orders do no
longer correspond to the drawing layers.

The best way seems to be to export a GDSII stream and use a third
party utility.


So far I tried:
__________
sfviewer 3.5 http://www.nathaniyer.com
Does not preserve colour during export or clipboard-copy. No custom
fill patterns.
__________
GDSII Viewer 1.58b (yuda@akina.ne.jp)
Works fine so far, layer stacking order is messed up though. This
could be fixed in Adobe Illustrator (or similar) afterwards, but is
time consuming.
Perhaps I create a script for that…
I have no URL, but I can send you that program (+source) on request.
__________
SoC GDS Seduction
http://www.dolphin.fr/medal/socgds/socgds_free_overview.html
Does not allow you to print or export graphics.




Do you have any suggestions what else I can try?

 

[fogh]

Dave,

I would like to generate EMF files from (simple) schematics or waveforms. How could I do this in skill ? (I hope it would be cleaner than from eps to emf).

David Cuthbert wrote:

Manuel Koch wrote:

I want vector graphics output OR high resolution bitmap. The problem
with Cadence is that their printing service produces a horrible
mixture of both.


This is an unfortunate aspect of how display stipples are defined. I,
too, have been less than pleased with the resulting output.

I can think of a number of fixes, but none are that simple:

1. Allow the display data to define both a bitmap and a
Postscript-defined pattern. Then your fill patterns are defined in the
ideal formats for both screen and paper. Downside: requires more work
for the user.

2. Allow the user to specify how much the bitmap is bloated. Downside:
very hard to make this look right.

If you have one of the following outputs set up:

- postscript (1,2): you get the outlines of polygons as a vector
graphic and the fill patterns as low-res bitmaps; unfortunately the
fill patterns are not clipped to their corresponding polygons but
merged with all layers and cut in ‘larger squares' afterwards.


I am seeing some oddities with the way we draw polygons and conics, but
the resulting output looks correct. Are you seeing the same?

At any rate, we probably should be clipping the polygons. I'll see if I
can find out why we're not.

With
the :residentfonts: option text is preserved as text, but each letter
as a separate object, so you cannot change the size or shape of text
afterwards.


Hm... this I'm not seeing. I put a label, "This is a label", on my
layout; I see the following Postscript:

1 rfta save 0 /Courier findfont
140 90 0 rfsc
(This is a label) rft

(Just to make sure... you've spelled the option as :residentFonts: ?)

Can you describe how to make a small testcase which exercises this?

- hpgl: you get only the polygon outlines, no fill patterns;
unfortunately shapes are merged, clipped and stacking orders do no
longer correspond to the drawing layers.


Unfortunately, I have no way of testing HPGL output here in Pittsburgh,
so I can't comment on this.

The best way seems to be to export a GDSII stream and use a third
party utility.


Another route (which I might try out this afternoon) is to write a SKILL
script which generates Postscript directly from the objects on the
layout. It's about a week's worth of effort if you're a SKILL and
Postscript expert, much longer otherwise.

Anyway, I will ping the CAT folks (who are in charge of plotting
services) on these issues.

Thanks,
Dave

 

[Manuel Koch]

Hi Dave,
thanks for the detailed reply.

1. Allow the display data to define both a bitmap and a
Postscript-defined pattern. Then your fill patterns are defined in the
ideal formats for both screen and paper. Downside: requires more work
for the user.

How exactly would I do this? The documentation of the display resource
file shows only how to create bitmap patterns.
Could you please give me an example how to define a postscript fill
pattern?

I am seeing some oddities with the way we draw polygons and conics, but
the resulting output looks correct. Are you seeing the same?

The polygons are correct. But if plot HPGL or remove the fill patterns
from postscript afterwards it is very time consuming to fill these
polygons with nice patterns (in Illustrator).

With
the :residentfonts: option text is preserved as text, but each letter
as a separate object, so you cannot change the size or shape of text
afterwards.

Hm... this I'm not seeing. I put a label, "This is a label", on my
layout; I see the following Postscript:

I didn't actually look into the ps file, I just tried to change the
text in Illustrator which failed to work. I will have a look at that
issue again and report back here. Maybe I misspelled the
resident-fonts option.



Writing a SKILL tool to export to postscript directly would be nice
(and much appreciated by many Cadence customers), but I do not have
any experience with SKILL or postscript.



The PNG-Output Roger Light suggested works actually quite good. I
still need to fine-tune the printing resolution and plot-scale (which
both have an effect on pattern-density)

regards,
Manuel

 

[fogh]

David Cuthbert wrote:

fogh wrote:
I would like to generate EMF files from (simple) schematics or
waveforms. How could I do this in skill ? (I hope it would be cleaner
than from eps to emf).
Hm. Not easily. The problem is that EMF (Windows Enhanced Metafiles)
is a binary format, and SKILL generally does not handle binary strings
well (specifically, it won't pass NUL characters through).

Dave,
I just had a look in the source of openoffice (v 1.1 ) and found an
EMF writer class under ./svtools/source/filter.vcl/wmf/ and a GDI
implementations (if you want to get rid of the need for a windows
machine) under ./vcl/source/gdi/

It is a shame there is no documented way to call external C functions
from skill. Could that EMF writer class be turned into some kind of
interpreter daemon that waits for skill to send GDI-like commands to it ?

 

[Mike Stabenfeldt]

The layout software package I offer has a printing option. The
output can be a PNM file. PNM's can be easily
translated to jpeg if desired. The PNM file is a pure
fairly high resolution bitmap. (about 3k pixels in each
direction). If you'd like to give it a try let me
know & I'll set you up with an eval key.

Mike Stabenfeldt
http://www.stabie-soft.com

 

[Manuel Koch]

David Cuthbert <dacut@cadence.com> wrote in message news:<41702337$1@news.cadence.com>...

Writing a SKILL tool to export to postscript directly would be nice
(and much appreciated by many Cadence customers), but I do not have
any experience with SKILL or postscript.

Heh, ok, I hear you guys loud and clear.

Hi Dave,
did you mannage to get write skill code for that issue?

regards,
Manuel

 

I would like to generate EMF files from (simple) schematics or
waveforms. How could I do this in skill ? (I hope it would be cleaner

than from eps to emf).

Generating EMF straight from GDI is obviously only possible on Windows.

Have you tried our ps2vector software to convert EPS to EMF? Some
pretty big electronics manufacturers are pretty happy with it, and
chose us over open-source alternatives. Curves stay curves, text stays
text, line styles are preserved, images are preserved, cropping is
preserved. Since it takes (E)PS as input, it can be used in conjunction
with Cadence on any platform.

remove the fill patterns from postscript

Something ps2vector can do automatically during conversion. It does
Neat Tricks, developed for users like y'all.

Jeroen Dekker