Fair point re: seamless ability of unicode to allow tradit= ional ascii use

The firefly bitmaps embedded within the chinese .ttf= can be obtained as standalone bdf files
there is a bdf file for each bi= tmap size 11x11 through to 16x16
the tar.gz of all of them weighs in at = 2.7MB
I started with 16x16 as I figured it would be the most readable, a= nd the stroked symbol can be scaled thereafter in PCB anyway.
PCB may ne= ed to be made cleverer when it scales up/down symbols, so that the linewidt= hs scale more proportionally.

-rw-rw-r-- 1 esh esh 2760898 Aug = 30 22:37 ../firefly-bdf-bitmap.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 esh esh 2379772 Mar 2= 7=C2=A0 2005 fireflyR11.bdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 esh esh 2469844 Mar 27=C2=A0 20= 05 fireflyR12.bdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 esh esh 2549475 Mar 27=C2=A0 2005 firefly= R13.bdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 esh esh 2638024 Mar 27=C2=A0 2005 fireflyR14.bdf-rw-r--r-- 1 esh esh 2720938 Mar 27=C2=A0 2005 fireflyR15.bdf
-rw-r--r-= - 1 esh esh 2812183 Mar 27=C2=A0 2005 fireflyR16.bdf

The = relevant resolution bdf would be sufficient in the user's local pcb ins= tallation if the larger ttf outline glyphs aren't going to be used.
=

My conversion code simply reads a bdf description= extracted from a bdf file, (the bdf file is a bunch of these statements) s= uch as:

STARTCHAR uni68F9
ENCODING 26873
SWIDTH 1000 0
DWID= TH 16 0
BBX 15 15 0 -1
BITMAP
1020
1024
103E
1020
FDFC=
1104
19FC
3504
55FC
5124
9020
97FE
1020
10201020
ENDCHAR

and the alpha code can spit out an xbm, = a dot matrix pcb symbol, an ASCII rendition, and a stroked PCB symbol.
<= br>

On the fly conversion with a large bdf file should be simple = enough. I am not sure how much of a wrapper the ttf format would add.

I haven't got my code searching & extractin= g a glyph description from the big bdf file yet, as I have been working on = the heuristics. So far it only processes a single bdf description that it i= s given and the code needs some tidying up.

I agree with = the already expressed sentiment that it would be really good to grow the po= tential user base with glyph support.

Cheers

Erich= .

On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 1:27 PM, DJ Delorie &= lt;dj AT delorie DOT com&g= t; wrote:

The whole point of UTF-8 is that we don't need something to tell UTF-8<= br> strings from ascii strings :-)

Symbol['<ascii character>']
Symbol['<utf8 character>']

And I don't think storing hundreds, if not thousands, of glyphs in the<= br> *.pcb file as Symbol[]s, makes any sense at all.=C2=A0 We really need to be=
able to read a *.ttf file directly if we're going to support large
fonts.

> If the PCB file format becomes binary,

I think a zip file is OK, because lots of OSS projects use zip, and<= br> the internal file is still ascii anyway so you can always extract it.
Best of both worlds :-)

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