"inverted" silk screen ?

Archive BatchPCB
1

I’m trying to submit an board designed in Altium and upon

submission, the images produced by the bot seem to show a problem

with the silk screen (both top & bottom).

It appears like the silk screen is inverted, i.e. ink where there should be none

and no ink where there should be some …

Look at the attached picture for an example of the output.

Any idea on how to fix it ?

2

Normal IMO. Looking at one of my bot files emailed back, silkscreen over non-copper areas was rendered in black, and rendered in orange over copper. However since I had a geometric pour over my board, most silk rendered in orange. So the black parts were not obvious to me before I studied the images after reading your post.

Still, I would try also viewing your files with gerbv. That should distinguish if there is any problem with Altium files that might have been otherwise missed. But I think your silk is not reversed.

3

Sometimes silks do get inverted. To counter this, I review every design that comes through batch before I panelize, if a silk was inverted I would change it to the correct position. If you have any more questions feel free to email support@batchpcb.com

4

I don’t think the silkscreen is “inverted;” it looks like the image-rendering system is identifying the silkscreen as solder-mask.

It happens to my boards all the time, and looking in the Marketplace, seems to be happening to quite a few other customers as well. A few look right, though. In the “right” ones, I see white silkscreen; and the green solder-mask has reddish-yellow “holes” over the pads, or black if the mask is open over bare board.

I’m hardly “fluent” in Gerber, but I did have a look at my files, and found a comment line that gives each file a “page number;” is it possible the bot is reading these numbers? I posted a more extensive comment along these lines [here.

Maybe editing these page numbers would help things? Any suggestions on where to start?

Thanks for any help.](http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=12162&p=111862#p111862)

5

WonkoTheSane:
I don’t think the silkscreen is “inverted;” it looks like the image-rendering system is identifying the silkscreen as solder-mask.

I think it is just a color code by the DRC. Black means silkscreen over non-copper. Goldish tan that you see (RGB ~ 158,123,52) means silkscreen over copper.