gnupic@linuxhacker.org

> I am not even sure what 'pre-sensitized' means? Anyone care to
> give/point to an explanation?

An older, now nearly unheard of method of doing PCBs was to buy a resist
pen and tapes, and do the PCB layout entirely by hand. One would buy a
copper-coated board and either draw by hand or use these "tapes" (press-on
tracks, pads, arcs, etc) to create a design on the PCB. This design then
served as the resist for the etching step with ferric chloride or another
etchant.

A "pre-sensitized" board is a copper-coated board with a photoresist
already applied to the board at the factory (rather than you having to buy
a plain copper-coated board and apply the photoresist yourself). It could
be a positive or negative photoresist. So, you can buy a pre-sensitized
board and get right to work fabricating PCBs as has been described here,
or you could get a plain copper-coated board and put the photoresist on it
yourself (I suppose you could get the stuff... I don't know why anybody
would do it themselves instead of buying a pre-sensitized board, though).

Greg Hill