PCB Overview
Pcb is a printed circuit board editor for the X11 window system. Pcb includes many professional features such as:

Up to 8 copper layer designs
RS-274-X (Gerber) output
NC Drill output
Centroid (X-Y) data output
Postscript and Encapsulated Postscript output
Autorouter
Trace optimizer
Rats nest
Design Rule Checker (DRC)
Connectivity verification
Pcb is Free Software
Can interoperate with free schematic capture tools such as gEDA and xcircuit

Introduction of PCB
Each layout consists of several, mostly independent, objects. This chapter gives an overview of the object types and their relationship to each other. For a complete description of how to use Pcb, refer to Getting Started. The layout is generated on-screen on a grid that can have its origin at any desired location. The X coordinate increases to the right, Y increases down to the bottom. All distances and sizes in Pcb are measured in mils (0.001 inch). One unit on the coordinate display is one mil in distance on the board. The grid may be set on a metric pitch, but is only correct to within the nearest +/- 0.01 mil because Pcb stores all dimensions as integer multiples of 1/100 of a mil or 0.00001 inch.

The sections in this chapter are sorted by the order of appearance of the objects within a layout file.

Symbol Objects: Information about fonts and symbols.
Via Objects: Vias and pins connect layers.
Element Objects: Element, the basic type of circuits.
Layer Objects: A container for lines, text...
Line Objects: Tracks on the board
Arc Objects: Curved tracks
Polygon Objects: Planes and such
Text Objects: Objects to add symbols to your board.
Net Objects: Describes the desired connections on the board.

Getting Started
The goal of this chapter is to give you enough information to learn how Pcb works and how to develop your layouts to make the best use of Pcb's features. All event translations (i.e. the buttons and keys you press) refer to the default application resource file shipped with Pcb. There is probably no need to change this unless your window manager uses some of the button events itself; however, if you want to customize the behavior of Pcb then changing the resource file is usually the best way to do it.

Get yourself a printout of this chapter and User Commands, if you haven't already done so, and follow the examples.

Start Pcb (the actual command will use all lower-case letters) without any additional options. If you get the error message:

can't find default font-symbol-file 'default_font'

then the font searchpath or filename in the application resource
file is wrong. Be sure that your m4 program supports search paths. If not, get GNU m4. For other messages, see problems. Another quick-start is provided by pcbtest.sh in the src directory. If some features don't seem to work, try running pcbtest.sh, if that works, then Pcb hasn't been installed properly.