X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f
X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Message-ID: <51BE355E.5040600@sonic.net>
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:59:58 -0700
From: Dave Curtis <davecurtis AT sonic DOT net>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20121028 Thunderbird/16.0.2
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: [geda-user] gschem text measure
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

Hello again,

It's been a while since I've been doing much PCB design work, so I quit 
following geda-user for a couple of years.  Anyway... I'm back. 
(Different e-mail, was n6nz AT arrl DOT net in the old days, I think...)

So... in gearing up to do a few boards, I've been dusting off a symbol 
generator that I started and set aside.  The goal is to create 
ANSI-compliant schematic symbols.  I've got some code just about ready 
to push to github that is a reasonably near-miss -- there's things it 
doesn't do, and several things that true ANSI-bigots will call me out 
on.  Meh... it's close enough that I'm happy for now and it's time to 
push it out.

My question:

In order to calculate symbol width and layout text correctly, I need a 
function to correctly compute the width of each character in strings.  
When I originally started the code, I slurped some table out of gschem 
that was a look-up table that returned a character width.  It doesn't 
seem very accurate any more, so I suspect gschem has updated character 
rendering since then.  Can somebody point me at the code that is the 
current correct way to do a layout measurement on a text string?

Thanks,
   Dave