How Do You Generate Fabrication and Assembly Drawings in Altium Draftsman?

Detailed Explanation

Every PCB manufacturing handoff needs two categories of deliverable: machine-readable data that a fabricator's or assembler's equipment consumes directly (Gerber, drill files, ODB++, IPC-2581 — see what fabrication output files does a PCB need?), and human-readable engineering drawings that the fabricator's or assembler's engineering team reviews for context, clarification, and sign-off. Altium Draftsman is Altium Designer's built-in tool for producing that second category — fabrication drawings and assembly drawings — generated directly from the live design rather than redrawn separately in a general-purpose drafting package. For the broader Altium workflow this fits into, see How to Use Altium Designer: Schematic Entry and PCB Layout Workflow, which covers Draftsman's Fabrication Output neighbour in the same toolchain.

Why a Dedicated Drawing Tool, Not Just Gerbers

Gerber and IPC-2581 data tell a fabricator's CAM software exactly where to plot copper, drill holes, and place solder mask — but that data isn't meant to be read by a person checking, for example, "does this board's mechanical outline match what I expect," or "which reference designator is which component on the assembled board." Draftsman fills that gap by generating the dimensioned, annotated drawings a person actually reads: a fabrication drawing showing board outline dimensions, hole callouts, and layer stack-up; an assembly drawing showing component placement with reference designators for a hand-assembly or inspection team to work from.

Document Types and View Content

A Draftsman document is added to the same Altium project as the schematic and PCB documents, and can contain multiple view types on one or more sheets:

• Board/fabrication views — the board outline with dimensioning (following standard engineering drawing dimensioning conventions), critical hole and slot callouts, and layer stack-up diagrams showing each layer's material and thickness.
• Assembly views — top-side and bottom-side component placement views showing reference designators, useful as the primary reference for manual assembly, rework, or visual inspection.
• Drill tables — an itemised table of hole sizes, plating status (plated vs non-plated), and quantities, generated directly from the PCB's actual drill data rather than manually transcribed.
• BOM tables — a live bill-of-materials table pulled directly from the design's component and parameter data, rather than a separately maintained spreadsheet that can drift out of sync with the actual design.
• General notes and title blocks — standard drawing metadata (revision, date, drawn-by, approval fields) and free-text manufacturing notes (surface finish, solder mask colour, special process requirements).

Live-Linked Views, Not Static Exports

The core practical advantage Draftsman offers over producing the same drawings in a general-purpose drafting tool is that its views are linked to the live schematic and PCB data. When the board outline changes, a component moves, or the BOM changes, the corresponding Draftsman view and any live table reflect that change the next time the document is opened or refreshed — rather than requiring someone to manually redraw or re-export a static image every time the design changes late in the project. This matters in practice because fabrication and assembly drawings are often finalised only after several rounds of layout changes; a live-linked drawing avoids the class of error where an outdated drawing ships alongside a newer board revision.

Dimensioning Practice

Fabrication drawings follow standard engineering drawing dimensioning conventions — for example, ASME Y14.5's dimensioning and tolerancing practices, which many fabrication drawings reference explicitly or implicitly through consistent baseline dimensioning, hole callout formatting, and tolerance notation. Draftsman provides the dimensioning tools (linear, radial, and ordinate dimensions, hole callouts) to build these views to a professional drawing standard, but the discipline of dimensioning correctly — choosing a sensible datum, avoiding over-constrained or ambiguous dimension chains — is still the designer's responsibility, not something the tool enforces automatically.

Output and Batch Generation

A finished Draftsman document can be exported directly to PDF for distribution, or included as one of the deliverables in Altium's output job configuration — the same batch generation step that produces Gerber, drill, and IPC-2581 data can include the Draftsman drawings as part of a single, repeatable release package, rather than treating drawing generation as a separate manual step performed independently at release time.

Practical Examples

A contract manufacturer requests both a manufacturing data package (Gerbers, drill files, IPC-2581) and a one-page assembly drawing showing component placement and reference designators for their pick-and-place programming and manual inspection process. Rather than producing the assembly drawing in a separate CAD or drawing tool and maintaining it manually across board revisions, the design team adds a Draftsman assembly view to the project, which stays current automatically as later layout revisions are made before the final release.

A design team preparing a fabrication drawing for a board with an unusual board outline (a non-rectangular shape with several cutouts for connector clearance) uses Draftsman's dimensioning tools to fully dimension the outline and callout each cutout, giving the fabricator's engineering team an unambiguous mechanical reference alongside the Gerber board-outline layer.

Design Considerations

• Treat Draftsman drawings as a complement to machine-readable data, not a replacement. A fabricator's equipment still needs Gerber/ODB++/IPC-2581 data; Draftsman drawings serve the human review and sign-off side of the handoff.
• Set up the Draftsman document early enough that it captures real design intent, not as an afterthought generated only once at final release — this makes it more useful as a living reference during design review, not just a final deliverable.
• Confirm which dimensioning and drawing conventions your fabricator or assembler actually expects. Not every contract manufacturer requires the same level of formal drawing rigor; align the drawing's detail level with what the receiving team will actually use, rather than defaulting to either bare-minimum or excessive dimensioning.
• Include Draftsman output in the same batch output job as fabrication data where practical, so a single release step produces the complete, internally consistent manufacturing package. Zeus Design prepares complete fabrication and assembly documentation packages, in Altium Designer and other tools, for production PCB releases.

Common Mistakes

• Shipping a Draftsman drawing that's out of sync with the latest PCB revision because the document wasn't refreshed after a late layout change — even though Draftsman views are linked to the live design, they still need to be opened/refreshed and re-exported before each release, not assumed to update themselves silently in an unopened project.
• Treating a Draftsman assembly drawing as sufficient documentation without also generating the underlying machine-readable fabrication data. A dimensioned drawing alone cannot drive a fabricator's plotting or drilling equipment — both deliverables are required.
• Under-dimensioning a non-standard board outline, leaving a fabricator to infer critical mechanical features (cutout locations, non-standard hole positions) from the Gerber board-outline layer alone rather than from an explicit, fully dimensioned fabrication drawing.
• Maintaining a separate, manually updated BOM spreadsheet alongside a Draftsman BOM table, risking the two drifting out of sync — use the live Draftsman BOM table (or a single source of BOM truth) rather than duplicating the same data in two places that can diverge.