What advanced options are available in Engineer for the PCB Editor View?
This tutorial requires:
DesignSpark PCB V11.0.0Engineer provides additional View options to aid your advanced design requirements. These assist different process steps in laying out the components and tracks. Reverse View, i.e. viewing and working on the bottom side as if the PCB has been turned over is very popular. Reverse Layer Order, Hollow tracks and line tracks are all useful aids as your design progresses. These are illustrated below:
Reverse view.
Available from the menubar View - Reverse View allows you to design directly on the bottom layer as if looking at that layer.
You are not restricted to the "Top Down" view as in Explorer and Creator.
This is particularly useful when you have components on the bottom layer by providing a normal view of the bottom side as shown in this example PCB.
In the corresponding views of the PCB Editor, the top image shows the normal top-down view and the lower image is using the "Reverse View" feature, i.e. rotated in the horizontal plane.
Further enhancements to the view can be made by controlling the visible layers. Here for example is the reverse view with only the bottom layers displayed.
Reverse Layer Order.
Also available from the menubar, View - Reverse Layer Order allows you to keep your current view but reverse the layer order. This moves the lower layers up to be visually on top.
From a designer's perspective, you keep your board orientation but can quickly obtain a better view of the lower layers.
Here is the previous board with the normal view and below the "Reverse Layer Order".
This is particularly useful when tracks follow similar routes on top and bottom layers.
Further options - Hollow tracks and True Width.
Yes, there are some further options available to assist in the layout view.
These change the view to make it 'open' without the tracks obscuring the view, this is useful for high-density layouts with thin closely spaced tracks.
The first setting to learn about is "True Width", this does exactly what it says and displays tracks their actual width in solid form. This is the default view.
The "True Width" setting can be turned off and this is found with other layer settings in the "Colours" menu (shortcut "C") on the "Layers and Layer Spans" tab, click the position in the grid as shown below to toggle to "No".
The PCB editor display will change to either a 'line' or 'hollow' track representation according to another setting in Preferences.
With "Hollow Tracks when True Width off" unchecked, the PCB will show a narrow line representing the centre of each track. This allows clear routing paths of the tracks to be visible.
With "Hollow Tracks when True Width off" checked, the PCB will display the outline of the tracks, i.e. "hollow". This view will show the track widths such that you can still see where you have changed track widths to pass through narrow gaps etc.
Which view you prefer will depend on the board density and the task being performed, you can switch between views as required.
Additional reading
The core viewing settings available in all tiers are presented here.
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