I have a connector that overhangs the edge of the board, so part of its silk screen outline is off of the edge of the board. Not a big deal, but the Batch PC bot charges me more because it thinks its part of the board outline, and calculates the price on the smallest containing rectangle. Is there any way in Eagle to erase or crop that part of the silk screen without have to edit the part itself ?
cropping? that would be too easy… The other thing that would be too easy is have the service take a dimension gerber…
No, the standard way to do this is to edit the part in the lib editor. It’s not that hard and there are tutorials on the internet on how to use the editor. What I usually do after verifying that the footprint is correct is to push all the offending lines from tplace to the tdoc layer. Use the change/layer tool. Don’t forget to save the library and use lib/update in the schematic or board editor
Don’t edit the part, use the Sparfun silk_gen.ulp to copy all your silks to a new layer with the minimum silk width allowed by your board house. Then turn off the original silks and just edit the copied silk layers, use those in the CAM processor instead of the original silks.
The more recent cam file from sparkfun doesn’t use silk_gen but rather generates the silkscreen gerbers directly from tplace/bplace.
Welp…use this one then: ftp://ftp.cadsoft.de/eagle/userfiles/ulp/silk_gen.ulp
Editing part outlines will end in tears, you’ll accumulate parts you forgot you edited, and someday find out things don’t fit the way you expected.
When ever I edit a part, I move it into one of my libraries of verified parts. I keep them in a separate directory so eagle updates don’t overwrite them. I never trust a raw eagle library part. You never know where it’s been.
I just find it more convenient to edit a pcb rather than a part, because you get to edit how the part outline looks in-place rather than having to write down measurements or guess, update the library, and try again.
I go from the data sheet so it’s not real problem. I do dry check the fit though on every board I do - worth a half hour to avoid a coaster. Also, the outline still lives in the tDoc layer so I don’t lose that either. Each to his own.