Create pipe tables from PCB's drill files

John Peck
Published , updated

I use PCB to design PCBs, and I recently needed to embed a list of drills and their uses in a plain text file. PCB's drill file looks like this:

M48
INCH
T72C0.010
T71C0.015
T70C0.067
T69C0.039
T68C0.030
T67C0.046
T66C0.138
%
T72
X010249Y009035
X010249Y005886
X010268Y008256
X010268Y007075
X010268Y005107

...and I wrote drilltable.tcl to generate tables like this:

|------------+----------------------+------------|
| Tool       | Hole size (inch)     | Count      | 
|------------+----------------------+------------|
| T72        | 0.010                | 218        | 
| T71        | 0.015                | 95         | 
| T68        | 0.030                | 3          | 
| T69        | 0.039                | 10         | 
| T67        | 0.046                | 15         | 
| T70        | 0.067                | 1          | 
| T66        | 0.138                | 4          | 
|------------+----------------------+------------|

This borrows from an excellent usage example of Tcl's format command at the Tclers Wiki.