but I have to say this is a clear indicator that the way we communicate designs to fabricators is seriously flawed. It’s good to number the copper layers in the board so you can check after fab - many designers do this on every board: Anyone who’s had a few years experience getting boards fabbed with RS-274X has encountered delays to production because drills were missing or not aligned, or the board fab did not understand your gerber file extensions and had to have you rename files to suit their wants, or at worst received boards that had layers out of their correct order.

But it suffers from significant limitations among ocb designers. The old “Gerber files” standard is mature (30+ years old) and is accepted by all but the most primitive board fabricators. Meanwhile, IPC2581 consortium members are diligently marketing this new format which promises to solve the same problems when comparing ODB++ vs Gerber PCB format, and like Gerber X2 in an open industry-owned standard. While there has been much debate in the PCB industry over the past few years about new file formats for sending board designs to fabricators, one thing is absolutely clear - the old RS-274x (“Gerber”) is no longer adequate. Is this really because of it’s potential monopoly support or because it’s lacking in some way? For background, the article(s) I am referring to can be found here. It’s worth mentioning that Julian Coates (Mentor) has made some effort to keep ODB++ open to combat fear of monopoly, and has actually done quite a good job of it - yet adoption of ODB++ in industry can be viewed as nothing short of pathetic. Many of us recently have been following an interesting “battle” between Ucamco’s Karel Tavernier and Mentor Graphics’ Julian Coates about which format is better: on Karel’s side is Gerber, and more importantly the recently updated standard Gerber X2 versus the more mature ODB++ which was originally developed by Valor, later acquired by Mentor Graphics.

“Wenn Zwei sich streiten, freut sich der Dritte” - When two are fighting, the third is happy.

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