On Fri, 13 May 2011 12:14:45 -0400 DJ Delorie <d...@delorie.com> wrote:
> > IIRC my primary objection to the patch-as-was was, "where do we store > the TTF files?" PCB has no way to store binary blobs with the board, > and if you don't keep them together you risk someone else getting > different results. However, perhaps we could keep both "plain text" > and "TTF text" as different text types, so those who value pretty over > self-contained can get some love ahead of time? Can we just store it as BASE64-encoded or something blob for now? Yeah, it might take 200 KB+ to store a font, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to disk storage capacity these days. It's not as if I have 100 000 .pcb files on my disk either so I'm not at all concerned about size. I guess another option is to support storing the font file as a standard TTF/OTF file alongside the .pcb file. I am 100% against letting pcb use a system font directly without storing a copy inside or alongside the .pcb file. Advantages of separate TTF/OTF font file from .pcb file: (1) better storage efficiency since no wasteful BASE64 encoding need be done, (2) the .pcb file remains more focused on the layout so is easier to view/edit with a text editor or script programs, (3) possibly easier to implement since .pcb format needs less change. Disadvantages: (1) The .pcb file is no longer self-contained. Since I always use version control on the entire directory where the .pcb file is located, this is not really a problem for me in practice except for the rare occasion where I send a .pcb file to someone else. >From this I conclude that Peter Clifton's suggestion of using a container format like a ZIP file is a pretty good idea. It would combine the benefit of simply storing the font file in its native format, and also keeping the .pcb file focused on the actual specific layout description rather than extra resource data. I do like the idea of being able to do version control diffs on .pcb files easily, but I don't often do this in practice because I find that I rarely make simple enough changes to the PCB to be easily compared by eye in text form. Also, most modern version control tools have support for some type of plugin or extension for doing customized comparison of special file types. For instance, 'bzr qdiff' will show changed image files (PNG etc.) old and new side-by-side. > Note that it's been mentioned that PCB's internal "text" > representation should switch from ASCII-7 to UTF-8, and I agree. That should be quite simple and painless, right? Fully backward-compatible. Regards, Colin _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
