kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Marco Serantoni" <marco.serantoni@...>]

>Potrace is an interesting approach to draw fonts (when using the gerber output) and logos.
>Potrace converts bitmaps to polygons using lines and Bezier curves and gives very good >results.
>Kicad (and Gerber) knows how to handle usual polygons (using only lines asedges, not arcs 
>or Bezier curves)
>It could be *very* interesting to use Potrace to convert bitmaps (fonts and logos) to 
>polygons, if Potrace is patched to convert Bezier curves to polylines.
>Approximate a bezier curve to a polyline seems easy, but the main difficult is to choose the 
>number of lines (the number of corners)to approximate a given bezier curve.
>An other problem when using TTF fonts is how to handle zoom levels when redraw screens.
>wxDC does not handle zoom for texts.
>Texts are always drawn using scale 1, regardless the DC zoom setup.
>So before using any TTF font or so, this zoom problem must be solved.

jean-pierre from the few things i've understood from the library seems thatuses only lines as output and the approxymation seems to be managed by alphamax.

If text is managed as "definition" with a separate description of the polygon, we could have a good thing for portability between machines and the DCzoom (is group of lines as the others).

--
Marco