Re: gEDA-user: Solaris build problems, 'elp?

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 19:02 +0000, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:50:32 -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> 
> >    I assume I got the head with "git clone git://git.gpleda.org/
> > gaf.git"?
> > 
> >    (I'm a CVS/SVN guy...git gives me gas)
> 
> There is an abridged git howto in the geda wiki: 
> 	http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:scm
> 
> 
> >   Now if we could only do something about that horrid font.
> 
> Your wish is Peter Cliftons command. He managed to make gschem use an 
> external font engine for the screen (pango). My blog contains screenshots 
> of an early test version of the pango enabled branch: 
> 	http://lilalaser.de/blog/?p=90
> The text size issue has relaxed since then. And Ales decided to push 
> these features as soon as possible. 

There is still quite a bit of work to do before the pango rendering is
ready for inclusion. I've suggested to Ales that he might want to leave
that for 1.5.3, and get a 1.5.2 out of the door for people to test the
cairo stuff on its own for now.

I'd still like to see the pango stuff ready for 1.6, but with
anti-aliased text lines in the cairo branch (although slower than
pango), things aren't as bad as they used to be.

In case anyone's interested, remaining pango issues:

Metric hinting.. or not. On means we have to recompute text bounds at
every zoom level change, but output is legible. Output varies in exact
position w.r.t other objects on page with zoom level changes.

Glyph outline hintning.. various levels of. Turn it off, you have blurry
font outlines. Turn it on without metric hinting, and you get bad
kerning of characters, which also makes things harder to read.

Stroke thinning at low zoom levels.. Sometimes the pango rendered output
is more legible than the cairo rendering of gschem't font.. other times
not. The pango glyphs start to fade very quickly, once you reach a
particular zoom level. I can't really see how to avoid it though. Pango
(or cairo - not sure which) keeps reducing the stroke width below 1px
size, even with full glyph hinting switched on.

Should we tie the magic scale factor (about 1.3) to the same scale
factor used for postscript printing? It is probably going to be the same
number.

How can we keep printing support in step with the stuff pango can render
for us? (That might require a major shake up; using cairo for printing).

Best regards,

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)



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