gEDA-user: footprints -- novice`s problems

[Stuart Brorson]

> You don't really know if it works until you fab a board and try to
> solder the part to it.

That's true.

Anyway, my point is that newbies seem to have a hard time with more
mundane things like the footprints being syntactically wrong, or
perhaps not on the correct search path.  The best that a bunch of Free
Doggers could do is verify that each footprint loads without error
into PCB from a .sch export (via gsch2pcb).   It is really up to the
user to  verify that the footprint will correctly fit the part.

As a first pass, I often read my Gerbers into GCPrevie (*ugh*!
Windoze again!)  and then print them out 1:1.  Then I place my parts
on their footprints to verify that they fit correctly.  This doesn't
catch subtle errors like 2 mil too short for a solder foot.  But since
most footprint errors are large and not subtle, my method catches a
lot of errors.

I'd do it with PostScript output straight from PCB, but I understand
that PostScript's 1:1 doesn't really mean 1:1 exactly.  Or am I wrong?

Stuart