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Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2014 14:24:49 -0400
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Subject: Re: [geda-user] Chinese glyph rendering in pcb as symbols
From: Jason White <whitewaterssoftwareinfo AT gmail DOT com>
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On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 1:52 PM, DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
> 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 think zip would certainly be the most flexible path, that way you
can keep the human readable layout files and include whatever fonts or
images are required without inserting huge ASCII-encoded binary blobs
all over the place.

The tools and scripts would still work, all you'd have to do is feed them
the text file from the zip.

This also could (if one was so inclined) provide a means of isolating
the various components of a design, footprints, symbols, etc. from
the particular system or environment so that they travel with the file.

Element definitions could be moved to an internal folder in the zip
called "elements". This might also facilitate the creation of self
contained libraries. Which would be a boon to users I'd think.

-- 
Jason White