Hi RobotGrrl,
I’m sorry to see that it didn’t turn out– it looked pretty good a few weeks ago in gEDA. :(
From a quick glance at your Gerbers, I would have guessed that your top side would have had a nearly-solid copper layer across the top, and that you would have had soldermask holes through it, showing the “plasma” pattern in exposed copper (likely either gold or solder plated copper). I do think that I see what what might have gone wrong, however.
It seems as though your “plasma” pattern is not made up of little circles, but of *really* little square pixels, where each of those square pixels is only a few mils across– likely smaller than the minimum feature size of the soldermask from your PCB manufacturer. While the manufacturer may not be able to fabricate it as you drew it, they should have caught the error and asked you to revise it. So, this is at least partly a mistake on the fault of the manufacturer.
In testing here, I was able to convert the SVG to a PDF, and then to use pstoedit to convert that to a PCB file, all while keeping the original circle shapes from the SVG file. That can then be converted into a footprint, to clear the soldermask from the PCB. Alternately, you can create a second “copper” layer that contains the original pattern, and then manually merge the gerber for that layer with the gerber for the soldermask, to create extra holes in your soldermask, even without doing it directly in PCB.
What route did you use, such that you ended up with the pixelation?
