PCB Board Reverse Engineering Arcs

If you draw a line inside a polygon from PCB Board Reverse Engineering, it will either plow through the polygon creating a clearance, or touch the polygon. This behavior is selectable in the Settings menu for new lines. To change the behavior of an existing line, hit the J key with the cross hair over the line.

If you draw a line inside a polygon from PCB Board Reverse Engineering, it will either plow through the polygon creating a clearance, or touch the polygon.

If you draw a line inside a polygon from PCB Board Reverse Engineering, it will either plow through the polygon creating a clearance, or touch the polygon.

You can increase the size of the clearance by 2 mils on each edge with the with the K key. Shift-K will decrease the clearance by 2 mils. The increment may be changed from 2 mils through the application resource file. The clearance can be also increased, decreased and set by the ChangeClearSize action.

Lines do not need to intersect the center of a pin, pad, via, or other line especially in high speed PCB Board Reverse Engineering to understand that they make electrical connection. If the connection is too tenuous, running the design rule checker will report that the connection may break if the line width shrinks slightly.

PCB Board Reverse Engineering can handle arcs of any angular extent, but when you create an arc with the Arc tool, it will be a quarter circle (this means they always bend a right angle). Arcs are very similar to lines otherwise. They are created on the active layer and have the same thickness that new lines will have. The various clicks for creating lines work pretty much the same way for creating arcs by PCB Reverse Engineering Tools.

In order to make the arc curve in the desired direction, drag the mouse along the tangent line from the starting position towards the end position. If the grid is too coarse, it may not be possible to distinguish whether you’ve moved over then up, or up then over, so if you can’t seem to make the arc go in the direction you want, try pressing the Shift key while drawing the arc when Reverse Engineering PCB Card. Decreasing the grid spacing may also help. Alternatively you can draw the wrong arc, then rotate and move it where you want. Like the Line tool, after an arc is drawn a new starting point is established at the end point.

Whenever a starting point is established by either the Line or Arc tools it will be retained if you switch directly between the tools (e.g. F2 key for Lines, F8 key for Arcs. Arcs can either touch or clear polygons just like lines do. Of course connection searches, undo and all the other features you’d expect work with arcs too.


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