Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Kai-Martin Knaak <kmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 03 May 2008 21:47:19 +0100, Peter Clifton wrote:

> Re-fetch, checkout and build the branch now..

It builds right now. 
(make install spends most of the time just copying the symbol files. Is 
there an option to avoid this time consuming activity?)
Panning seems to be smoother now when zoomed in.

> Pango would be a win for doing this kind of thing, and works with cairo
> - but it doesn't yet lead neatly towards the support of gschem's own
> font.
> 
> This said, if we were to make it into a .ttf o similar, we could
> persuade pango / freetype to load it, and we wouldn't have to worry
> about cairo's new custom font APIs at all.

Hmm. Glyphs are generally build by contours. By contrast, letters of the 
geda font are just a collection of one-pixel lines. There is no way to 
match these at all possible sizes. IMHO the skinny look of the geda 
letters when zoomed in is not a feature but a remnant of the time when 
schematics were meant to be printed by plotters. I'd regard it an 
improvement if gschem were to use real fonts. 

There is a specialized drawing utility called fontforge, that takes care 
of all the format details. Pixel images of letters can be loaded as a 
pattern in the background. If it helps, I might volunteer to go through 
the alphabet and produce a ttf version of the geda font. 

On postscript output the font gschem uses a real font anyway. If I look 
into a postscript file I find the keyword  "helvetica". Why not use 
helvetica as default on the screen too? Due to license issues nimbus sans 
might be a better choice. 

---<(kaimartin)>---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
http://lilalaser.de/blog



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