kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 09:48:55AM -0500, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:

> makepdf.sh ----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=11x17 @ps2pdf.cmd project.pdf

I use a more brutal:

cat *.ps | ps2pdf14 -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - out.pdf

(sadly the wildcard doesn't get the pages in order... the sheet number in the
filename would fix that *todo*)

More interestingly, I use this to get a board preview (just before the gerber
inspection): (I use zsh because it has no issues expanding names with space
inside, sh or bash user should add the 'necessary' quoting)

--- CUT HERE --- eeplotpcb ----------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/zsh
BASE=$(basename $1 .brd)

# Extract the prologue from the drawing
sed -e '/translate 90 rotate/,$d' $BASE-Drawings.ps

COLOR="1.0 0.8 0.0"
echo "$COLOR setrgbcolor"
sed -e '1,/translate 90 rotate/d' -e '/showpage/,$d' -e "s/0 0 0 setrgbcolor/$COLOR setrgbcolor/" $BASE-Mask_Back.ps

COLOR="0.5 0.0 0.0"
echo "$COLOR setrgbcolor"
sed -e '1,/translate 90 rotate/d' -e '/showpage/,$d' -e "s/0 0 0 setrgbcolor/$COLOR setrgbcolor/" $BASE-SoldP_Back.ps

COLOR="1.0 0.0 0.0"
echo "$COLOR setrgbcolor"
sed -e '1,/translate 90 rotate/d' -e '/showpage/,$d' -e "s/0 0 0 setrgbcolor/$COLOR setrgbcolor/" $BASE-SilkS_Back.ps

# --- and so on ---

COLOR="0.0 0.0 0.0"
echo "$COLOR setrgbcolor"
sed -e '1,/translate 90 rotate/d' -e '/showpage/,$d' -e "s/0 0 0 setrgbcolor/$COLOR setrgbcolor/" $BASE-Drawings.ps

# Epilogue
cat <<EOF
showpage
grestore
%%EOF
EOF
--- CUT HERE --- eeplotpcb ----------------------------------------------------

The trick is using sed to isolate the prologue from the body... sadly doesn't
work with portrait files (it latches on the "translate 90 rotate" line); I
should look if maybe there is some DSC to add to better handle this. The last sed
statement is obviously a recolouring tool.

> I am not mistaken, this would make it possible to search within the PDF file for strings then.

Yes, it should. Also we could get both the advantages (exact typesetting and
searchability) if we could generate the 'OCR layer' for the PDF reader: an
hidden layer of text used for searching which is not displayed. No idea on how
it's done, most probably there is a special postscript incantation to do it
(like for annotation/links); maybe ghostscript supports it.

As for 'pure' postscript text (say, in Helvetica), single line is almost
trivial without the overlining... handling it requires 1) generating single
glyphs using the font metrics or 2) a non trivial postscript routine to format
it.

Multiline text is going to be a PITA for both DXF and PS (I don't get *why* I can't generate a good MTEXT entity)

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl