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From:	Rupert Swarbrick <rswarbrick AT gmail DOT com>
Subject:	Re: [geda-user] Chinese glyph rendering in pcb as symbols
Date:	Tue, 09 Sep 2014 08:50:48 +0100
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Bert Timmerman <bert DOT timmerman AT xs4all DOT nl>
writes:
> DJ Delorie wrote:
>>> If the current version of pcb is only capable of addressing 255
>>> characters than that is the first hurdle to take.
>>>=20=20=20=20=20=20
>> The 255 is not official, either.  Officially we support 127
>> characters, plain ASCII, because our file format is plain ASCII.
>>
>>=20=20=20=20
>>> Being able to address 2^16 characters (65k) may be enough ?
>>>=20=20=20=20=20=20
>> UTF-8 is the way to go.  It's backwards-compatible with ASCII.  IMHO,
>> at this point it's foolish to contemplate anything else.
>>
>>=20=20=20=20
>>> One thing I can foresee is that pcb files with Chinese fonts will
>>> become larger.
>>>=20=20=20=20=20=20
>> We'd need a way to refer to an external font somehow, but then we have
>> the problem of PCB files no longer being idempotent.
>>
>> Embedding large fonts might only be practical if we switch to a binary
>> format that can embed the compressed font as-is, but we'd need a way
>> to convert to-from text format, or use a container like zip, to work
>> with existing tools that want a plain text file.
>>
>>=20=20=20=20
> Hmm,
>
> IMHO, it's better to embed the font in the pcb file and avoid the
> "symversion" pitfall as in gschem et al.

Alternatively, allow the name of the font to be a path. Then if I just
want to use a system font, I give the name of the font. If I want to
bundle the font along with my PCB project (and geda schematic and
everything else I've been working on), I can specify it as something
like

  ./my-font.ttf

No binary blobs in the PCB file, sensible version control and no
significant change to the file format.


Rupert

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