When you run OffspringViewer (after following the instructions in the "Installation" section), it will come up showing a 3D object unrelated to printed circuits. This shape is useful only for practicing 3D view settings and operations. You may wish to try:
- The operations available under the "View" menu
- The options available in the "Viewer Colors" and "Settings" tabs. These options currently do not mean much for a printed circuit board. They may become more useful when components are rendered more realistically.
- Zooming
- Windows: drag mouse with both buttons held down
- OS X: Option-click drag
- Panning
- Windows: drag mouse with right button held down
- OS X: Control-click drag
- Rotation in 3D
- Windows: drag mouse with left button held down
- OS X: normal drag
To view an IPC-2581 file, select the "Open..." item from the "File" menu. Several example files are included. When you open an IPC-2581 file, the status bar in the lower left corner of the window will first tell you what the viewer is doing:
- Parsing the file
- Counting rendering operations
- Caching rendering operations
A Progress bar is displayed while rendering operations are cached.
If your IPC-2581 file has multiple Steps, you can select the one you'd like to view from the Step drop-down of the Content tab.
In addition to the graphical view, you can browse the XML tree in the XML tab.
Negative planes are rendered the same way positive planes are rendered. The "Layer Colors" tab lets you specify colors for different types of layers. This tab contains two small rectangular "color wells" for each layer type. One color well shows the color for positive features on this type of layer. The other well shows the color for negative features. Initially, each color well is diagonally divided into two areas. The top left half shows the application of the color to a white background. The lower right half shows the application of the color to a black background. The two halves are present to give a better idea of what partially transparent colors look like. When opaque colors are used, the two halves look the same. To change a color, double click on one of the color wells. The resulting color editing dialog provides several different ways of specifying colors:
- Color wheel
- Red / Green / Blue / Alpha
- Hue / Saturation / Value / Alpha
- Cyan / Magenta / Yellow / Alpha
- Named colors
Currently the "Cancel" and "Accept" buttons have no real meaning. Colors are are transfered to the "Layer Colors" tab as soon as you select them. These colors are not applied to the graphic representation of the Step, however, until you either select "Recache" from the "Views" menu or load a new Offspring file. Currently the alpha (transparency) values are not yet used (due to a bug in some of the underlying OpenGL wrapper): when the Step is rendered, all the colors are opaque. Currently there is no way to save these color assignments.
