Printing onto PnP Blue

[Aharon]

I need some advice/ideas on this.
What I have been doing is cut a piece of PnP and tape it to a sheet of regular paper and manually feed it through the printer to keep waste down on the expensive product.

What I'd like to do is print a whole sheet of PnP with as many PCBs as I can(same or diferent).
How do you guys do that,since most of the PDFs are locked and you can't separate the images?.
I magine I could scan them but that would degrade the quality,maybe.
Thanks for any help
Aharon

[Hal]

you could screen shoot aka "capture..."

you have to make sure you're at the correct zoom level first, but besides for that it should be easy....

simple windows way of doing it....press "print screen" once.  It seems like it doesn't do anything, but a screenshot is now on your clipboard :-D

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

If you printed them at x2 or x3 mag, then rescanned them, I doubt the loss of res would be significant. I have printed stuff out & then gone to a photocopy place & scaled down on the copier (takes a bit of futzing around, what with copiers being a bit nonlinear) but eventually close enuff for rock n roll, or at least p n p.

[wstephens]

Acrobat has a "snapshot tool" that allows you to select an image form a PDF and copy it to your clipboard.  Do this and then past from clipboard into your graphics program of choice (personally this is GIMP) and you're ready to go.

You will have to watch the scale of the image to make sure you stay at 0.1inch between pins.

[Aharon]

Thanks to all.
Aharon

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Feeding "taped down" stuff into a laser printer or photocopier, be careful the tape doesn't melt and wreck the drum, this can get you banned from Kinko's.

[Fret Wire]

I print up all the layouts I want. Then I cut them out into individual layouts. Then, tape them all on to copy paper to match the size of the board. Put the taped-together layouts in the scanner and use the copy function to print on the pnp blue (transparencies in my case). I just did 14 pcb's on a 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 board at once last nite using that method.

[Aharon]

Hey Fret,do you loose any sharpness or detail?.
Thanks
Aharon

[Aharon]

Feeding "taped down" stuff into a laser printer or photocopier, be careful the tape doesn't melt and wreck the drum, this can get you banned from Kinko's.

That's my problem,I used to do that with my old printer(Brother HL4 or something)but it stopped working,now I got a new one and I don't want to do that just in case that was the cause,besides it's inpractical.
I will try Fretwire's method and the capture and see what's best with my equipment.
Thanks
Aharon

[Fret Wire]

Hey Fret,do you loose any sharpness or detail?.
Thanks
Aharon

No, I've never lost any detail. Actually, the first thing I do, is make (scan) a copy (set on best print) of the taped layouts. Then I check them for detail and resolution, and have never had any problems. Then I put the template in the scanner and direct copy on to the transparency. When I'm done, I still have the transparency and template copy for future use. With PNP Blue you'd still have the template to use again and again. If you saved the original taped up sheet, it would fall apart eventually or the tape would yellow.

All this because I can't figure out how to resize images or crop them on one copy and keep the resolution right.

[Willie Caja]

Well, actually, if you've got Adobe Illustrator you can open any PDF and edit it as you wish (that's how I got the Tremulus layout I'm building, redraw it and did exactly what you are willing to do).
Some people DO lock PDFs so you won't be able to open them on AI, but, well, if you do a search on Google you'll find a way to open almost anything...
BTW, did any of you guys use the UV sensitive boards to etch PCBs?
Regards,

W.

[mugan]

What about taking the picture right from th pdf file, then to put it on a ms word document and copy/paste it many times? You can even control the
size of the image.

[Aharon]

All good ideas.Will try them.
Thanks
Aharon