Not just for text! If you have certain silkscreen graphics that you tend to use again and again — logos or other design elements — Pinguin can drop these in over placeholder rectangles.
Principle is similar to text. Place rectangle objects in the tPlace (21) or bPlace (22) layers and run the board file through Pinguin. But first…
Associate an image filename with a rectangle by setting the object’s group property.
You can do this by right-clicking over a rectangle and selecting “New Group” from the pop-up menu, then entering an image filename (located in Pinguin’s “symbols” sub-folder). Or you can change the image (group) via the Properties dialog.
The group thing is admittedly weird and clunky but it’s the only place we found to easily attach this extra information to a rectangle.
Images can be in BMP or PNG format. BMP is ancient but long-time EAGLE users might already have a lot of silkscreen elements in that format (it’s what the old school import-bmp.ulp script uses; how we did this before Pinguin).
Pinguin will observe a rectangle’s rotation setting when placing images. For example, if you need a logo rotated 90 degrees, set the rectangle’s angle property. You’ll get no visual feedback in EAGLE (it still looks like a rectangle), but you’ll notice the difference when running it through the Pinguin script. This might require a couple tries to get right. As with text, the original rectangles are saved in layers 172–173 if you need them back.
Unlike text which is always rasterized at 1200 dots per inch (or whatever -dpi setting was specified), images don’t observe a hard number here; the source bitmap is scaled to the rectangle’s dimensions (letterboxing or pillarboxing as necessary to keep image pixels square, see below), whatever that works out to be.
Let’s suppose one has a logo they anticipate using at various sizes from 1/2 to 1 inch wide. You could produce two different images, one for each size, at 1200 DPI (or your preferred working resolution). These would then be 600 and 1200 pixels wide. But it’s likely sufficient to split the difference and make a single image…900 pixels in this case…which works out to 1800 DPI at the 1/2 inch size and 900 DPI at the 1 inch size. Both are more than ample and won’t appear jaggy on the finished board; the actual silkscreen resolution will be something less than that.
As explained on the “Using” page, EAGLE’s bitmap rendering makes things appear more rough than the finished product. Try using a Gerber PCB viewer for a better preview of the finished product!
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