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Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2014 13:52:49 -0400
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From: DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
In-reply-to: <5409F1C2.3090406@xs4all.nl> (message from Bert Timmerman on Fri,
	05 Sep 2014 19:24:18 +0200)
Subject: Re: [geda-user] Chinese glyph rendering in pcb as symbols
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> If the current version of pcb is only capable of addressing 255 
> characters than that is the first hurdle to take.

The 255 is not official, either.  Officially we support 127
characters, plain ASCII, because our file format is plain ASCII.

> Being able to address 2^16 characters (65k) may be enough ?

UTF-8 is the way to go.  It's backwards-compatible with ASCII.  IMHO,
at this point it's foolish to contemplate anything else.

> One thing I can foresee is that pcb files with Chinese fonts will
> become larger.

We'd need a way to refer to an external font somehow, but then we have
the problem of PCB files no longer being idempotent.

Embedding large fonts might only be practical if we switch to a binary
format that can embed the compressed font as-is, but we'd need a way
to convert to-from text format, or use a container like zip, to work
with existing tools that want a plain text file.