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KiCad GAL changelog

 

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


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