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Subject: Re: [geda-user] A complete set of CJK glyphs rendered as PCB
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On Mon, 15 Sep 2014, Erich Heinzle wrote:
> Anything that increases the potential user base by > 1 billion has got to be
> a good thing.

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration.  For it to be true, lack of this
feature would have to be stopping the ENTIRE population of China from
becoming users of the software, and be the ONLY thing stopping them.

Do we have any indication that anybody actually wants to put what comes
out of bitmap-to-stroke conversion from low-res Chinese bitmap fonts onto
a PCB at all?

I maintain a Japanese-language stroked font project
(tsukurimashou.sourceforge.jp).  My project wouldn't be suitable for
Chinese and doesn't really have full character coverage for any CJK
language; but other projects do provide stroke data for these kinds of
characters with better coverage.  It doesn't have to come from bitmap
conversion.  I'm most familiar with the Japanese-language ones, which
include the Hershey fonts from the 1960s (incomplete coverage,
unfortunately); KanjiVG (complete coverage of Japanese in SVG format -
these would probably be easiest to convert for gEDA use); and Wadalab (the
original source of many of the Asian-language fonts shipped in Linux
distributions to this day).  Chinese-language projects of similar nature
do exist.

If someone wanted to put stroked CJK characters onto a PCB, I think they'd
be much happier using something derived from one of those sources, instead
of from an attempt at converting low-res bitmaps back to strokes.
Low-res bitmaps always contain significant compromises of the basic
geometry of the characters, in order to get them to fit the grid at all.
As a simple English-language example, in some of my terminal windows a
lowercase "m" appears as just a solid rectangle, because there isn't
enough horizontal resolution in the low-res bitmap to render the three
vertical strokes separately with nice spacing.  That's readable in its
correct context, but imagine what it would look like, and whether it would
be acceptable, after being converted "back" to strokes.  CJK bitmap fonts
are rife with such cases.  That's why doing the conversion in the other
direction, from strokes to bitmaps, is a largely manual process despite
the expense of doing it at the scale of these character sets:  knowing
where to make the compromises is a very difficult thing to automate.

-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala AT ansuz DOT sooke DOT bc DOT ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/