On Sun, 14 Aug 2011 01:48:42 -0400 Gus Fantanas <fanta...@innocent.com> wrote:
> Third, can pcb handle UTF-8 characters? On the silkscreen I want the > Ω character to appear (for Ohms, as in "50Ω"). The text entry window > accepts the Ω just fine, but then the text on the silkscreen displays > /two/ blocks for it. gschem seems to display Ω in text and μ in > values fine, but it may have trouble printing these characters. My workaround for better text support is to draw the text in Inkscape using whatever TrueType/OpenType fonts I want (full Unicode, of course) and even adding graphics in some cases (board logos, etc.). Then export to EPS, use pstoedit to convert to pcb format. (There are some problems with bad polygon shapes in pstoedit's output, however. I think DJ has a script that will fix the output from pstoedit so it works better in pcb.) Using Inkscape to make the text allows much more beautiful text than the default pcb font. I have tested it on real boards' silk screen and found that using Inkscape with fonts like Droid Sans provides much greater readability and superior appearance to the default pcb font at similar character sizes. Not to mention you can use the full Unicode character set and include graphics as well. The main downsides are (1) if you want to change the text, you have to edit your .svg in Inkscape and re-import into pcb, then re-position the polygons composing the text; and (2) if you have a lot of text and/or graphics on the board imported from Inkscape, then it can be tricky to select, move, or delete individual strings because the little polygons composing the text or graphics are not grouped in any way, so you need to carefully make sure you select all the polygons for the text you want to move without selecting any bits of other text. Regards, Colin _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
