kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've done the deed and I'm testing it. It only supports Latin-1 text for now...
it *could* handle UTF-8 but it would lose compatibility with pre-R15 importer
(which is IMHO very important). Depending on people request we could add a
'target release' for export (like librecad: R13 or 2000, which is R15). IIRC
these day kicad writes R12 DXFs, if you're interested...

Text is exported as... drum rolls... TEXT entities! 

All the alignment are supported, and mirrored text too. The ~ overline
character is translated in the corresponding %%O/%%o sequences (which seems
that nobody else than acad handles... better than nothing, however).

For bold/italic handling it generates 4 STYLEs (one for each combination) and
also declares a 15 degrees oblique angle for the italic styles. Font is
declared as isocp.shx (which is standard *and* freely available).

I made it import to different apps with various degrees of success:

- R14 reads it perfectly; all features works; I have 2004 only at work so I
  can't test it yet;

- LibreCad is OK; text is a little out of place since the font has different 
  metrics but very acceptable (LibreCad has its own font format); overlining,
  styles and mirroring are not supported (it uses the style name as a font
  name). Latin-1 characters OK.

- CAM350 is OK; no Latin-1 character (doesn't have it in the font), no
  overlining, no styles;

- gerbtool reads it but I can't see nothing... anyway gerbtool importers sucks
  in general (and there are better way to load stuff to gerbtool, obviously)

I'm attaching a DXF for testing and comments.

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl

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