I’ve been frustrated by the ungainly gerber viewers that are available for download, and since I could I built a website that allows anyone with a modern browser to upload and view gerber files (one at a time, or in a zip).
The site is circuitpeople – find it with google, since I can’t post the URL here.
Enjoy!
out of curiosity, what’s wrong with viewmate?
Nothing’s wrong with Viewmate. I use it from time to time.
But not everyone a) has it, b) is willing and able to download and install it, or c) will register with a company that wants to sell them stuff to get it. It may also be a little too complicated for people that just need a WYSIWYG picture of the content of their files.
I like the circuitpeople solution for the simplicity of it: post a file, look at the contents, and download the images if you need them.
I use GC-Prevue. PCB-Pool, who I use a lot to make my prototypes, charge less if supplied with GC-Prevue files instead of Gerbers, as they use the full version for panellisation and it saves them some time.
Leon
That’s actually pretty cool. Not sure how much I’d use it though. Quicker for me to use Viewmate.
It was able to read the copper pours that the bot has trouble with 
It also put horizontal lines through the pours; I’m not sure why…
It didn’t seem to like my inner layers (negative) though… Didn’t display them.
blah.gbr has Gerber274X content to be used for Unknown .
blah2.gbr has Gerber274X content to be used for Unknown .
hooziewhatsit: I’ve posted a couple updates to the site since you used it. I think you’ll find that those inner layers do get rendered now. Mind trying again? Those “grey stripes” in the rendering happen when the gerber uses ‘stroked fills’ rather than polygons for copper pours and the strokes don’t overlap (respectable CAD systems shouldn’t use this technique, IMHO, since polygons are so much more efficient).
I can solve the problem by putting a little checkbox on the page for “Use Antialiasing”. With antialiasing turned off the grey lines won’t appear. Sound reasonable?
Yep, it now reads my inner layers.
Another feature would be to toggle between negative/positive on the internal layers.
Interesting about the difference between polygon fill, and stroked fill. I presume stroked fill is where there are actual arcs, and polygon fill is short lines making up arcs?
Turns out my PCB program can output in either format. I’ll try polygon and see what happens.
Just wanted to let everyone using CircuitPeople.com know that I recently (as in yesterday) updated the site with storage and sharing functions. Now your uploaded designs can be “shared” (basically, emailing someone a link) and stored in your account.
Thanks!
Hi, there is also another online gerber viewer…
You can display multiple files with mixed colors, zoom by many different ways, export high resolution pictures and so on. Everything online, no installation is needed ( http://www.gerber-viewer.com )