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Re: gEDA-user: PCB: simple FreeType fonts implementation -- update?



On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 06:55 -0700, Colin D Bennett wrote:
> I just ran across an old thread started 2009-03-12 by Ineiev with a
> super cool patch for rendering text with the FreeType library (standard
> TTF/OTF/etc. font support!).
> 
> * Subject: PCB: simple FreeType fonts implementation
>   From: Ineiev
>   Date: 2009-03-12 09:32:40 GMT
>   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cad.geda.user/22983
> 
> It looked to me like most of the work was done in the patch but it was
> left to rot!  Perhaps the only thing left to be done is to embed the
> font files in the .pcb file so that it doesn't depend on system fonts
> (future-proofing files, exchanging between systems, etc.).
> 
> Any chance to revive this?

It is yet another thing which really wants to see our file format
improved / revised before we can use it robustly.

We need to embed (at least a subset) of the fonts used by a design into
the .pcb file in order to ensure its geometry remains consistent on
different machines with different fonts installed.

I'm in favour of a container based format (probably .zip based) where we
can actually drop in complete files. There is a very nice library,
called libgsf for managing these "structured" files. I'm using it for my
work on reading Altium files. (Altium files use a Microsoft FAT based
container format which that library also reads.)

It would of course be nice to retain the capability to use text based
version control on our files, but I recall seeing somewhere that some
VCS can actually dig inside the contents of such container files to
track changes in them "properly".

-- 
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!)
Tel: +44 (0)1223 748328 - (Shared lab phone, ask for me)

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