ViewMate

What works

Install works. 
Application launches and runs.

What does not

To open a Gerber file, the user has to first enter an asterisk (*) in the Open dialog and press Enter, otherwise ViewMate will only look for .bin files. Or the user could rename their Gerber file(s) to *.bin in advance.

There is very visible flickering when dragging the mask/layout around. When printing (via CUPS), the vias are jagged and pixelated, as opposed at the rest of the higher-rez printed circuit layout. This can also be observed when printing to (a PostScript) file. It's possible to manually go File -- Print To ".bmp" File -- Print Frame... and then specify a 1200 dpi under Options, but for some reason the resultant file will not just have 1200, but also be a much larger image than the actual circuit. Even subsequently opening this image with a third party graphics editor (e.g. the GIMP) in order to crop the huge empty top and right margins away is VERY slow and consumes a huge amount of memory. Once that is done however, a good image remains with none of the aforementioned via jagginess, and that image can then be saved as a b/w .png and/or printed for use with the toner transfer method (in fairness, maybe the huge margin was also due to something odd with the single Gerber file I tested).

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multi-layer gerber files. Anything except opening a single Gerber file, looking at it and printing it.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments