kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Maciej Sumiński <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>]

On 04/15/2016 03:41 PM, "Torsten Hüter" wrote:
> Hi Orson,
> thanks for your nice work. I remember that we have discussed about this subject 
> a few years ago - in general I think it's an advantage to
> have an alternative for the stroke font. Not for performance, but for the visual 
> quality.
> I'd call it rather "outline font" instead of bitmap font, because that's more 
> general - see also
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_font#OUTLINE
> Of course you're using a texture for the font atlas, but the origin was a 
> outline (or vector-) font.
> For a higher quality at small sizes you need also a font atlas with different 
> detail levels. I did some research back then and
> found freetype-gl the best libary for these purposes.
> https://github.com/rougier/freetype-gl
> Perhaps you can reuse some code from them, for instance the atlas creation or 
> the shaders.

Hi Torsten,

I had a look at the mentioned library when I was considering possible
ways to go about the problem. It would be great if we wanted to use a
number of fonts, especially to give possibility to use anything
available in current system fonts, but in our case I do not see any
advantage over the current method. If we were developing GIMP, then I
surely would vote for it, but I think it is enough to have one font in
KiCad.

Likely it also means we ought to start shipping fonts with KiCad to be
sure that texts can be rendered properly.

It is not hard to rescale font atlas to get a few different sizes,
either manually or with OpenGL mipmapping. If we really need to limit
ourselves to a few possible font sizes then it can be done, but for the
moment I do not see a big gain here.

Regards,
Orson

> Thanks,
> Torsten
> I have just enabled regular OpenGL mipmapping, but I do not see a
> significant difference. I consider the mentioned text (net name on pad
> 1, C2) to be just too small to make it readable. If you compare the
> original font and legacy view, they have the same problem and I am not
> sure we can do much about it.
> 
> Regards,
> Orson
> 
> 
> 
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