I've been a recent convert to Eagle PCB CAD, and even paid them  $50 for a
registered  copy.

<rant mode = ON>  I do pay my shareware bills,

and I wish Jory would excommunicate all these guys offering CRACKED software
on the PIClist! I hope that these crackers actually write some REAL software
someday, and then get it ripped off, and then go broke making no money after
being robbed.

<rant mode = OFF>

Here's my dillema.  I need to panelize a PCB - it's a 2" X 2" board and I
need 6 of them in a 4" x 6" layout.  No problem in my old CAD systrem (which
other than having panelization was useless).  Eagle is a great software
package, but it does not have a panelization option.

How about just copying everything over and over?  No good - I didn't buy
enough square inches of EAGLE (crippleware, you know) to do a very big
board.  All my designs are really tiny!

I found I could monkey-wrench a panelized version by making a gerber file,
then making another with an offset, then another with another offset, and
using a text editor and scrunching them all together, moving blocks of stuff
around to fix the syntax of the file.  Tedious, time consuming, and
educational.

I tried this old DOS trick:  copy gerber1.gbr  +gerber2.gbr +gerber3.gbr
final.gbr
which appends all the files together.  My software can read it, but I don't
really trust it very well.  Anybody know if this would really result in a
valid Gerber file?

Is there any Gerber file editor out there that can panelize a gerber file
without so much pain?  Same issue with a drill file?  I don't have a way of
reading back a drill file to know if it is corrupt or not.

-- Lawrence Lile