31 May
2007
31 May
'07
9:58 a.m.
Chris M wrote:
that's useful stuff Tony. I have to wonder if
there is
software (an algorithm?) that could take a multi-sheet
schematic and produce a big one page schematic out of
it. It's probably easy enough if you sit down and take
the time, but hell what are computers for???
Well I suppose it exists already in the form of photo-stitch software
(assuming hand-drawn schematics, otherwise copy/paste in your favourite art
package [1] will do the job nicely).
Beyond a certain level of complexity though it makes sense to separate
schematics onto multiple pages according to circuit function anyway, otherwise
printing the thing would require either such an enormous sheet of paper as to
be unmanageable, or such a tiny level of detail as to be unreadable. Same goes
for viewing on screen.
(I was looking at schematics for Acorn's Risc PC the other day for someone; if
put onto one sheet of paper it'd be around 5ft x 7ft in size - and as a lot
of the functionality is provided by custom chips, schematic-wise it's not even
*that* complex compared to a lot of systems)
[1] I believe some of the Imagemagick utilities will let you do this
programatically from a shell script, but I've never needed to try.