| FreePCB User Guide | Version 1.2

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7. Tutorial (continued)

7.4 Drawing the Board Outline

In this section, we will create the board outline for our PCB. It will be a rectangular board, 3 inches long by 2 inches high. You might want to review Section 5.10: Board Outline before starting.

- First, let's move U2 out of the way. Zoom in on the board origin by placing the cursor over it and scrolling forward with the mouse (or by pressing PgUp). Select U2 by clicking on it. A white outline should appear around it, indicating that it has been selected. Press F4 to begin moving it, and drag it down and to the left of the origin to make room for the board outline. Scroll the window as needed with the scroll wheel or by pressing "space". (By the way, a window describing all of the keyboard shortcuts is available in Help > Keyboard shortcuts.)
- Left-click the mouse to place U2 at its new position.
- When drawing the board outline, the Placement grid will be in effect. Set it to a reasonably large number like 100 or 200 mils.
- Select Board Outline from the Add menu. The cursor should change to a cross-hair. Place the cross-hair at the origin (i.e. X=0, Y=0). Left-click to place the first corner of the outline.
- Now move the cursor vertically upwards.. You should be dragging a blue line segment, representing the left side of the board. Move the cursor to X=0, Y=2000 and left-click to place the upper-left corner of the board.
- In similar fashion place corners at X=3000, Y=2000 and X=3000, Y=0.
- Now right-click to close the board outline by drawing a side from the last corner to the first one. Your board outline should look like:

- You can check the position of a corner by clicking on it to select it. A small white square should appear around the corner to indicate that it has been selected. Then press F1 ("Set Position") to pop up the Corner Position dialog. This displays the exact coordinates of the selected corner, and allows you to change them if you want. This dialog is very useful if you are designing a board with unusual dimensions.

- If you wish, you can try out some of the other commands for editing the board outline, as described in Section 5.10: Board Outline. When you are finished, be sure that the outline has been restored to its original rectangular shape.
- Save the project from the File menu.

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