I don't particularly mind if the final solut= ion employs stroke -> PCB derived fonts instead of my initial symbol set= . Obviously, stroke -> symbol derived fonts are going to be nicer to loo= k at. It was an interesting exercise for me whether or not the symbols even= tually get used.

Nevertheless, I think having something a= vailable in the interim for people needing a few glyphs here or there is be= tter nothing, and I was primarily hoping that by providing a full CJK symbo= l set it would provide some impetus to implementing unicode support.

Which CJK symbol set should ideally be used is not the rate limiting= step here, unicode support within symbol definitions is.

Cheers,

Erich.

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 2:08 PM, <mskala@= ansuz.sooke.bc.ca> wrote:

<= span class=3D"">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.=C2=A0 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
(tsukurim= ashou.sourceforge.jp).=C2=A0 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.=C2=A0 It doesn't have to come from bit= map
conversion.=C2=A0 I'm most familiar with the Japanese-language ones, wh= ich
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<= br> original source of many of the Asian-language fonts shipped in Linux
distributions to this day).=C2=A0 Chinese-language projects of similar natu= re
do exist.

If someone wanted to put stroked CJK characters onto a PCB, I think they= 9;d
be much happier using something derived from one of those sources, instead<= br> 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 is= n't
enough horizontal resolution in the low-res bitmap to render the three
vertical strokes separately with nice spacing.=C2=A0 That's readable in= its
correct context, but imagine what it would look like, and whether it would<= br> be acceptable, after being converted "back" to strokes.=C2=A0 CJK= bitmap fonts
are rife with such cases.=C2=A0 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:=C2=A0 knowing=
where to make the compromises is a very difficult thing to automate.

--
Matthew Skala
mskala AT ansuz DOT sooke DOT bc DOT ca=C2= =A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0People before pr= inciples.
http://ansuz.sooke.= bc.ca/