Re: gEDA-user: Line Thickness in Imported DXF Files; Rotating by Arbitrary Angle; UTF-8

[Colin D Bennett <colin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 14 Aug 2011 01:48:42 -0400
Gus Fantanas <fantanas@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Third, can pcb handle UTF-8 characters? On the silkscreen I want the
> Î character to appear (for Ohms, as in "50Î"). The text entry window 
> accepts the Î just fine, but then the text on the silkscreen displays 
> /two/ blocks for it. gschem seems to display Î in text and Î in
> values fine, but it may have trouble printing these characters.

My workaround for better text support is to draw the text in Inkscape
using whatever TrueType/OpenType fonts I want (full Unicode, of course)
and even adding graphics in some cases (board logos, etc.).  Then
export to EPS, use pstoedit to convert to pcb format.  (There are some
problems with bad polygon shapes in pstoedit's output, however.  I think
DJ has a script that will fix the output from pstoedit so it works
better in pcb.)

Using Inkscape to make the text allows much more beautiful text than
the default pcb font.  I have tested it on real boards' silk screen and
found that using Inkscape with fonts like Droid Sans provides much
greater readability and superior appearance to the default pcb font at
similar character sizes.  Not to mention you can use the full Unicode
character set and include graphics as well.

The main downsides are 
(1) if you want to change the text, you have to edit your .svg in
Inkscape and re-import into pcb, then re-position the polygons
composing the text; and
(2) if you have a lot of text and/or graphics on the board imported
from Inkscape, then it can be tricky to select, move, or delete
individual strings because the little polygons composing the text or
graphics are not grouped in any way, so you need to carefully make sure
you select all the polygons for the text you want to move without
selecting any bits of other text.

Regards,
Colin


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