kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Fabrizio Tappero <fabrizio.tappero@xxxxxxxxx>]

Lorenzo,
fantastic results !
complimenti.

Fabrizio


On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Lorenzo Marcantonio
<l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> OK, persuaded the PDF engine to show stuff using a builtin font. Even
> got the font metrics of the Helvetica family in kicad.
>
> Results are exactly as I imagined...
>
> - In attachment pdf-hidden-font.pdf you can see text drawn as usual
>  (using paths) with the same text drawn in render mode 3 (i.e.
>  invisible) with the Helvetica fonts.
>
>  You have wysiwyg with eeschema *and* you can search for text (because
>  the hidden text is present); even the highlight box is more or less
>  good (plausible and identifiable, at less, compared with the 1-dot
>  text hack in the postscript engine)
>
> - In attachment pdf-native-font.pdf you can see under the hood what's is
>  happening... I excluded path text and used rendermode 1 (i.e. the
>  postscript show operator). As you can see the text is aligned
>  correctly but since metrics are different (Helvetica is bigger than
>  the iso font) it goes out of the box (BTW I fixed the dashing
>  operation). I don't remember the metrics of the stock kicad font but
>  probably you can fudge the scaling to better match Helvetica to it...
>
>  This could also double as a 'plot using postscript fonts' example. So
>  the downsides are that: text is different (both in face and in size)
>  and repertoire is limited (more or less to Latin-1)
>
> I'd keep only the 'hidden text' for search... is someone interested in
> native postscript fonts? As I could see the only upside is that the pdf
> is a lot smaller and probably render faster (since it's using Type1
> fonts instead of path stroking).
>
> Let's discuss about how to proceed...
>
> Multipage PDF is next in the pipeline... Postscript would be doable too, but what
> about changing paper size? there is the PageBoundingBox comment but then
> the main BoundingBox would be set to the union of all the pages (and
> anyway I don't know of *anything* that would handle properly this
> situation). PDF page size is simpler to do (each Page object has its own
> MediaBox) but you need to handle multiple streams and the page catalog.
>
> I'd say to keep the ps engine single page (like the HPGL), so it could
> be used for eps embedding and other stuff (like my pcb composition
> script); PDF would handle multipage instead without problem... given
> that many people use ps only for distilling the ps engine would be
> 'downgraded' to an export format like HPGL. Does it sound good as
> a plan?
>
> --
> Lorenzo Marcantonio
> Logos Srl
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers
> Post to     : kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers
> More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
>