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Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2014 20:17:56 +0200
From: Bernd Walter <ticso AT cicely7 DOT cicely DOT de>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: [geda-user] Chinese glyph rendering in pcb as symbols
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On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 01:52:49PM -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
> 
> > 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.

I edit a whole lot manually in my PCB files and I use subversion to
many changes.
If we really have to embed binary data, then I would very much prefer
any kind of hex or mime encoding, so that it's still possible to edit
the non binary parts.

-- 
B.Walter <bernd AT bwct DOT de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.