kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Manveru <manveru@...>]

2009/5/22 Lorenzo <lomarcan@...>:
>
>
> --- In kicad-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Manveru <manveru@...> wrote:
>
>> This looks nice for standard size, but for smaller size the kerning
>> fails. But as I understand this is only a proof of concept code from
>
> What kerning? :P Anyway, I plotted this with a 4mil pen, the small text is
> only 30mil IIRC... BTW these are package names and RS order numbers so even
> if they're not readable in the plot who cares :D
>
> Maybe the 'kerning' error you talk about is due to integer roundup... this
> issue was already discussed about the partial zoom, IIRC.

I meant the separation between letters on small texts, I think even on
high scale zoom, thay are too close. maybe it is a side effect of
integer...

>> What bothers me is how hard in these fonts Unicode glyphs can be
>> achieved? Do the font has glyphs from German, Polish, Ukrainian, Greek
>> or Russian alphabets? Greek is interesting for µ symbol or couple
>> other on schematics.
>
> The Hershey collection has glyphs for latin, cyrillic and technical greek
> (in the 'symbols'). Extended accents could be done with composition (GNU
> plotutils does so to implement Latin-1... btw it contains the full
> repository, including kana and kanjis).

So greek may be useful. But some national characters... hmm...
composition may be hard to maintain.

>> Because I have seen mention about Cairo today and about XOR method for
>> glyphs draw, I can tell that Pango has really nice support for font
>> rendering on the screen and with Cairo supports SVG and PDF export.
>> But I do not know whether even thinking about this technique is
>> possible in KiCad's case, where strong dependency on low-level DC is,
>> as I saw in some emails on this list. I know Cairo only from Python so
>> I can't say is it suitable for KiCad.
>
> The problem is I don't think Cairo can do XOR. And, anyway, we need a vector
> font for doing gerbers...

Cairo is vector based and may produce vector output. You do not need
XOR because image is redrawn where it should be. But there is no
primitive management. Inkscape handles it somehow.

But there was a discussion on other thread, that it is too slow for
KiCAD (has any one results of such testing?)

-- 
Manveru
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http://www.manveru.pl