Data Sheet

LABCENTER ELECTRONICS LTD.
162
Board Output Options
Last, but by no means least, we come to the crucial business of reproducing the pretty on
screen graphics on paper or film. Under Windows, most hard copy devices are supported
through the normal Windows printer drivers. Additionally, we supply our own drivers for pen-
plotters, Gerber photoplotters and Excellon NC drill machines.
Printing
We will deal here firstly with printing to an ordinary Windows printer device – it is unlikely that
you will have a photoplotter to hand! The first step is to select the correct device to print to using
the Printer Setup command on the Output menu. This activates the Windows common dialogue
for printer device selection and configuration. The details are thus dependent on your particular
version of Windows and your printer driver - consult Windows and printer driver documentation
for details.
Then, with a layout loaded, invoke the Print command from the Output menu.
The dialogue forms offer a number of controls, all of which have context sensitive help
associated with them (context sensitive help on dialogue forms is accessed with a ‘point and
shoot’ mechanism via the ‘?’ key at the top right of the dialogue form). The default settings
should do for getting something and you commence output generation by clicking on OK.
Output can be aborted by pressing ESC, although there may be a short delay before everything
stops whilst Proteus and your printer/plotter empty their buffers.
With plotters in particular, you will probably need to experiment with pens, paper, and the
various settings on the Set Devices dialogue form in order to get optimum results. Full details
may be found under the chapter Hard Copy Generation in the reference manual.
The PCB Layout will remember your printer settings from the Printer Setup dialogue
and maintain them independently of your printer settings for other applications. This
means that you can configure a default set of printer options solely for use with the
Layout application.