kicad-developers team mailing list archive

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

OK, done it, tested it somewhat, and it seems to work fine...

What 
changes for the user:
- Mostly nothing... 
- removed the 'Org=Center' 
checkbox in the pcb plot dialog (since no plotter in these days require 
it... anyway it's easy to put it back)
- You can have the sheet frame 
plotted on gerbers (it's useful)
- You can have the drill sheet on 
gerber (very useful to check hole sizes before manufacturing), it 
follows the axis chosen for the drill tape.
- Pad on silkscreen also 
shows surface pads, not only the drilled ones (of course you'll never 
submit silks with pads to manufacturing for obvious reasons but for 
verification could be handy)

What changed inside:
- A lot (is a big 
patch:D)
- 99% of the plotting code is now device independent: there is 
a Plotter base class which works somewhat like a DC, and three 
subclasses for the actual plotting implementation (PS, HPGL, RS274X)
- 
New aperture allocation code: just pick your pen size and draw or 
request flashes. No more manual aperture selection before plotting:D 
now is STL based, instead of the old linked list implementation. There 
is a simpler handling of the temp file, too.
- Two layers of drawing 
primitives: low level one (line, arc, circle, rect, poly, marker) 
eventually inside filled. High level ones supports flashes and 
sketch/filled primitives (NOTE sketch mode is not fully tested for 
gerbers)
- Easier coordinate transformation (no more separate 
calculations for mirrored plots and such, just set the paper size)
- 
Mostly device independent plotting: except some peculiarities (i.e. pen 
overlap in HPGL) one initialized the plotter object works the same for 
every output. So no more if (IsPostscript) or switches on plot format 
around the program. I didn't try but you could actually plot a 
schematic on a gerber just changing class instantiation.
- Should be 
easy to extend, if we want to export as DXF or some other format (for 
example if wx support for svg is not adequate), just implement a new 
subclass and plug it in the plot initialisation

I also have done (not 
included here) a full ISO font with tech repertoire and a simplex font 
for cyrillic (no idea if it's ISO conformant). These are problematic 
for some reasons:
- The iso font (latin and greek) was generated from 
the isoct and isogreek freely downloadable from iso. They're not 
exactly free to use, altought they were also hand tuned after 
conversion (for example, capital omega in the iso font is broken).
- 
The cyrillic one was similarly extracted (with different scaling) from 
a free (no license found) .shx containing an extended version of the 
hershey simplex sans.
- The remaining glyphs for the technical 
repertoire were made by me, no problem on these :D:D

If someone is 
interested I can give the .shp converter I've built and the resulting .
h font files too... but I'm not sure about public distribution, the 
licence is not clear.
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