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Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 20:37:40 +0200
From: Bert Timmerman <bert DOT timmerman AT xs4all DOT nl>
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To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: [geda-user] Chinese glyph rendering in pcb as symbols
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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.
>
>    
Hmm,

IMHO, it's better to embed the font in the pcb file and avoid the 
"symversion" pitfall as in gschem et al.

Good for archiving/reclaiming *complete* projects as well.

Kind regards,

Bert Timmerman.