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Subject: Re: [geda-user] Apollon the technical thread
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Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 17:28:00 +0200
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On Tue, 2015-09-22 at 10:53 -0400, Jason White
(whitewaterssoftwareinfo AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
> There is no need to depend on the availability of external fonts on a
> particular system. I believe the lowest overhead way of doing this
> would be to convert a true-type font to primitives (lines, arcs,
> circles) and package it as a set of footprints in the layout
> database.
> All that is needed is a script to convert a range of characters in a
> true-type font into a library of footprints. That way, when a text
> primitive is inserted into a design, the graphical editor just
> inserts
> the converted footprints for each character.
> 
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 3:30 AM, Levente (leventelist AT gmail DOT com) [via
> geda-user AT delorie DOT com] <geda-user AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
> > Yes, that would be nice to have pretty fonts on the layout, and
> also
> > arbitrary bitmap. To be honest, I don't know how to implement that
> when it
> > comes to gerber output.
> >
> > Maybe with one of these?
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_raster-to-vector_conver
> sion_software

Yes, that is an interesting topic. Thought about it a bit some years
ago, but it was my feeling that all users were happy with the current
state.

I think for screen display we should have a real font, an arbitrary one
which is installed on the current system. For gerber export we can
export that used font to line and arc elements, or replace it with a
special predefined "gerber font" with same size and similar shape.
Personally I was never happy with the PCB font elements stored inside
of the PCB files. For small PCBs the font occupies more space in the
PCB file than the real layout. I would try to avoid that.

Of course there are two problems: Portability and the fact that
automatically converted fonts may look not really good in gerber
format. I think the first point is not too important, fonts may look a
bit different on different systems. One problem can arise when the font
in the gerber file is larger and covers pure copper areas.