kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Maciej Sumiński <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>]

I got rid off the artifacts resulting from mipmapping, and I think the
branch [1] is ready for merging. Apart from bitmap fonts, there are also
a few other changes that should improve performance a bit.

If there are no objections, I would like to merge the branch next week.

Regards,
Orson

1.
https://github.com/orsonmmz/kicad-source-mirror/tree/cached_container_refactor

On 04/14/2016 11:33 AM, Maciej Sumiński wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As recently Jean-Pierre has reported he had been running out of memory
> with complex boards, I decided to take another step to reduce memory
> footprint of OpenGL canvas.
> 
> Currently, the most expensive thing to draw is stroked text, as there
> are lots of labels on tracks and pads. To reduce the drawing cost (and
> memory requirements), texts that are not targeted to Gerber files (i.e.
> pad & track labels) might be displayed using bitmap fonts. This way, a
> single letter cost is reduced from tens of triangles to just two.
> 
> Another gain is we can select any font for this purpose and easily
> change it. I picked one for testing, but I think we have to decide
> together which one shall be used. Bitmap fonts are also antialiased (I
> am sorry Lorenzo), so they might be a bit easier on eyes.
> 
> As texts now do not occupy as much memory space as they used to, they
> might be stored in the video card memory. Thanks to that, they might be
> displayed on selected items as well (in the past selected items had
> labels removed). This should also reduce per-frame traffic and make
> rendering process smoother.
> 
> I did my best to use the same character set as is available with the
> original stroke font, but I wonder if it is really necessary. It seems
> that net/pad names are limited to latin characters, so maybe we should
> limit the character set. Thoughts?
> 
> At the moment bitmap fonts are only available in OpenGL canvas, as I
> believe they offer the greatest performance boost there. I am not sure
> if Cairo can really benefit from such solution, but it might be tested
> as well.
> 
> Before I push the changes to the master repository, I will be grateful
> for some testing [1] and feedback. There are also two screenshots [2, 3]
> to demonstrate the difference.
> 
> Regards,
> Orson
> 
> 1. https://github.com/orsonmmz/kicad-source-mirror/tree/bitmap_fonts
> 2. https://orson.net.pl/pub/original_font.png
> 3. https://orson.net.pl/pub/bitmap_font.png
> 
> 
> 
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