kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Lorenzo" <lomarcan@...>]

I rewrote the vector font routines to handle Hershey fonts instead of the current fixed width squarish font (I don't know if it has an official name:D)

Results are good (I was tired with the bad legibility of the builtin font AND it was too big for silkscreening), I put in the RomanSimplex (AKA HersheySans) and it works fine...

PRO:
- Legible and ubiquitous plotter font (Hershey fonts are EVERYWHERE)
- Variable width text
- ... more text in the same space :D
- Large repertoire if needed (I only mapped 7-bit ASCII)

CONS:
- Slightly more complex (so slightly slower, at least in theory)
- Variable width text (but most of the text is aligned anyway... only eeschema doesn't handle centered text - HINT HINT:P)
- Unusual for copper text, but who cares? I've seen designs with comic sans:P:P
- Break old files with manually aligned text (centered labels in eeschema, again), so it's not 100% backward compatible; this COULD be a problem with pcb (i.e. need to recheck zones and clearances... even if it's almost always smaller than the original).

I'm playing with it and I can provide sample screenshots and PDFs of the final result. At work they already love it :P

What do you think of it?