kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Paul \"LeoNerd\" Evans" <leonerd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2016 16:29:07 -0600
Collin Anderson <metacollin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 1. Increases the segment count used for arcs, circles, curves, text,
> everything (as well as the output geometry of the various plotting
> engines) to 2 or 4 times what it currently is, as decided by setting
> either KICAD_SMOOTH_CURVES or KICAD_SMOOTHER_CURVES.  These default
> to off, but the option is there.  The nice thing is that this is all
> applied to how geometry is generated, so, for example, refilling a
> pour and saving the .kicad_pcb file, then opening it in a stock
> version of KiCad will yield the same smoother geometry for some
> situations.  I think the gerbers would not though.  Regardless, there
> aren't any interoperability problems.
> 
> Also, I would argue that the last time it was appropriate to
> approximate a circle with 32 sides was around 1996, as my Nintendo 64
> has several games for it (a soccer/football game, for example) that
> draw large circles (white paint on the field) and they are also 32
> sides.  It's now 2016, I think we can manage maybe a *few* more sides
> than my 20 year old console with 4MB of ram and a 65MHz graphics
> coprocessor.     

Could this be done dynamically? I'm quite sure that 16 sides is
perfectly adequate for little .2mm via drills, whereas that might be
inappropriate for 20mm cutouts. Maybe dynamically scale the edge count
based on the overall radius; start at 16 and keep doubling it until the
maximum deviation between a straight edge and the "true" curve to be
approximated is below some agreed delta, where people can choose how
fine a curve they want by picking that delta. 

-- 
Paul "LeoNerd" Evans

leonerd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.leonerd.org.uk/  |  https://metacpan.org/author/PEVANS

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