Low quality of silkscreen text in gerber files

[robertfoss]

Hi,

The quality of the silkscreen text is very low when viewing the gerber output in separate applications.
Is there a way to improve the quality? Because now it’s barely legible.

Rob.

[cyu.qu]

Hi @robertfoss,

Do you have a link to your project and/or screenshots of the gerbers in the gerber viewers that you’re using? What is the font size of your silkscreen text?

[robertfoss]

After having a look at a few other gerb viewers it would seem like gerbv from gEDA is the culprit.

[joeyhagedorn]

I talked to my PCB manufacturer and they indicated the line width on the text was too large, causing low quality text.

Silkscreen text outline width is too thick, creating blurry text

I’ve been creating boards and having them manufactured by OSH Park. When I get them back, the text always looks quite blurry. They indicated that the problem was the outline stroke of the text was 8 mil lines, making small text (1-2mm size) look very blurry the problem was with the gerber files I supplied. Hand tweaking the silkscreen gerber to use a thinner stroke yielded much better results. Perhaps the text tool could be smart and specify a proportional stroke width on the text? Seems lik…

[zak]

I’ll add something to the list here, but screenshots, design ids, etc, etc would be very helpful for debugging this further.