John's PCB Making tips

[hobojoe]

ok now I have a question, I have always used this method to make my pcbs but looking over the tutorial again the pcbs made look much cleaner than mine because it seems that whenever I print out my layouts the pictures are always pixelated a little bit and make my boards look sloppy.  I can never get perfectly round circles they always seem jagged and sometimes this gives me problems as the jagged edges sometimes come in contact with my other traces.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Hambo]

It depends what art program your using. In paintshop I get the biggest picture of the PCB design I can, by printscreening Express PCB as big as possible on the screen, then I crop it in paintshop, and resize it to the right dimensions by choosing the size in inches in the resize dialogue, then at the top it gives you a percent size of original - I bring that back up to 100% by adjusting the RESOLUTION of the resize. So the picture is still big, but its basically telling paintshop that you need it so many inches across or whatever. Also make sure you change the colour depth to 2 (black and white) before you print it.