Re: gEDA-user: Open GL survey (for PCB)

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 00:56 +0000, Alexander Gvozdev wrote:

> I'm maintain pcb for pan-russia/ukrainian/belorussian distro (AltLinux).
> Many people want "jump-up" from "ugly" GTK.

Still just as ugly for now ;)

> I may test pcb on various PC.
> I develop PCBs with 6-8 layers and think, what OpenGL increace randering 
> speed.

Yes, it does.. although it doesn't fix the time we spend computing
polygon fills.. which is another common performance problem

Give the works so far a try:

http://repo.or.cz/w/geda-pcb/pcjc2.git

git clone git://repo.or.cz/geda-pcb/pcjc2.git
git checkout before_pours origin/before_pours

(Then build as usual).

The origin/master branch has some other crazy stuff there, like support
for pour fills which do island removal by connectivity - and keep any
piece culled piece of a poured region which is connected to other
entities such as nets, pins etc..

(This allows me to do one copper fill for the whole board, and not worry
about having to fill in all the gaps which get culled by PCB's standard
"keep the largest piece" heuristic).

> Some question:
> What about migrating to QT3/4 and C++?

Nothing stopping someone from writing a GUI in QT (PCB supports multiple
front-ends). I don't know anyone keen to do the work.

> What about automatic adding plugins to main menu?

> What about non-english font as text-on-board? (I want button for selecting 
> font).

You'll have to _draw_ the font first.. unless someone writes code to
make silk-screen text from arbitrary fonts on the system. (PCB's font is
built in and made out of line primitives).

I'm not sure if PCB supports UTF-8 text, but if not.. doing that would
make a good start.

Freetype support could (I suppose) be added, if we were prepared to
define our glyphs in terms of polygons - which we could get out of
Freetype.

> "Free-rotate" must be in menu!
> Footprint-generator must be as a part of the pcb.
> m4 - go off!

m4 serves a useful purpose, at build time.. at the very least.

> Metric-only library. (it's imposibble, i know :))

Not _im_possible.. so long as its a very very small metric unit which
gets used.

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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