Subtracting soldermask from silkscreen in Gerber files

[mondalaci]

Thanks a lot for the info, you’ve just made me learn that this feature is called silk clipping.

I’m happy that Seeed does clipping but unhappy that there are still som fabhouses that don’t do clipping. I don’t really consider having a silkscreen over the pads a manufacturing error because if the available space is very tight then it’s almost unavoidable.

@matseng

A while back I asked Seeed about the same thing. viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2257
I can now happily report the fabhouse that Seeed uses indeed does silk clipping. But I’d really like to be able to clean up the gerbers myself with Gerbv or any other utility…

This board was actually a test for three things. See if it was possible to do an Arduino Shield on the 5x5cm service, to see if the silk clipping was done properly and test what happens if you remove the top or bottom part of a thru-hole pad. (The answer is that the hole still gets plated as can be seen in the lower left corner of the pix below)

In eagle the board looked like this - with a lot of silk all over the pads.
[attachment=1]KhamsaShield-Eagle.png[/attachment]

When I got the boards back it was all cleaned up and nice.
[attachment=0]KhamsaShield-0a.jpg[/attachment]