kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Torsten Hüter" <torstenhtr@xxxxxx>]

Hi Guys,

Funny that I've started a debate on principles :)

Sorry, I've forgotten to mention that two backends are currently supported; Cairo and OpenGL. Lorenzo is right - exactly that's the purpose of an abstraction layer - this way you can extend more backends, if the interface is known.

I've choosen Cairo, because it runs on most platforms well and supports rendering to pdf or postscript as well. OpenGL is very interesting for combining the 3D-Models with a 2D pcb tool (just overlaying the 3D models) and of course because of the hardware acceleration that modern graphics cards offer. 

However I've to agree with Dick; it makes no sense to support >10 years old hardware. Also OpenGL is today supported by almost any modern hardware.
In my opinion without OpenGL someone is missing one important feature of KiCad; the 3D view. I'm using it always for inspecting my boards; for instance the generated planes or the spacing of the components - it helped me really to sort out problems. 

Modern EDA Tools move toward 3D - Altium was one of the first; now Mentor Graphics offers a 3D viewer / exporter as well. I believe Altium uses DirectX for accelerated graphics. It's really pretty fast; I've seen a demo with a big fpga board.

--

Vesa:

I've tried simple lines; I'd say it looks without antialiasing a bit better - although not ideal (roughly on level with the current wxDC implementation). The major problem are very small letters, I'm missing the "crispness" of the desktop fonts. The OpenGL line implementation is somehow strange, for instance the line ends are not squared - thus I've used quads for polylines.

Ideal would be an subpixel antialiased line algorithm; but something like that is surely slower (who knows, perhaps that makes sense with a pixel shader in the future?).

Bye ..
Torsten
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