kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Maciej Suminski <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>]

First of all, thank you for all the comments and suggestions. They are 
very useful, especially bug reports (they really save me some time).

- Wayne Stambaugh found out that there were still some compilation 
errors using wxWidgets 2.8. He has already sent patches for that - 
thanks for a fast response and fix.
- I would like to thank Adam Wolf for launching a PPA for this branch 
(available at 
https://code.launchpad.net/~adamwolf/+archive/kicad-gal-testing-daily).

Bugfixes:
- Bug related to stroke_font should be already fixed. I suspect that it 
was caused by multiline strings, as the newline character did not have a 
proper bounding box computed.
- I have managed to recreate the tessellation error and fix it (there 
was a callback missing for the GLU tessellator).

Features:
- The most important feature introduced this time is the Cairo-based 
rendering backend. Now you can switch between the default renderer, 
OpenGL and Cairo (hotkeys Alt+F10/F11/F12 or menu View->Switch canvas 
to...). Cairo backend may seem to be slow, but it is a software renderer 
and its main purpose is printing or creating PDFs.

Other:
- The branch address has changed to lp:~cern-kicad/kicad/kicad-gal, as I 
wanted to make it possible to maintain the branch by more than person, 
so now there is a team for that.
- There is also a win32 cross-compilation guide available 
(http://www.ohwr.org/documents/251).

Plans:
Now the work is going to focus on speeding up OpenGL renderer, by means 
of caching rendered items. It should especially improve render speed for 
polygons, as right now they are tessellated every frame and that takes a 
lot of time. Using OpenGL display lists at first and Vertex Buffer 
Objects in the future should significantly increase FPS.
In the meantime I am also working on a version for Mac OS too.

Maciej Sumiński, CERN