>From a cursory examination of the Gerber spec (which I've never worked with before). It looks like the appropriate way to render an arbitrary font from it's vector representation is to render each non-contiguous shape of each glyph as a single contour (enable region mode with G36, draw the contour and then end the region mode with G37). Now this is tricky for many reasons.
1. The contour cannot self-intersect, except for coincidental segments, i.e., those who's start and end vertices are identical. This isn't a bad thing alone. The bad part is that non-coincidental intersections can occur due to rounding, creating a bad gerber for one device that is rendering it, but not another. :( Thus, we have to know in advance what this minimal pixel rounding value will be so we don't accidentally generate a bad gerber. 2. We don't get to work with actual polynomials, so everything has to be converted into straight lines and arcs. 3. Dealing with holes in glyphs (as in the letters 'O', 'p' and 'B') is a little bit of a pain because you have to add them as additional layers. If that hole needs to have something inside of it (I can't think of any English or Latin character examples), then 3 layers must be used, etc. So I would say that the way to perform this conversion is basically to have some type of resolution setting, but not in pixels, just to say how the glyph will be approximated and control the number of gerber instructions. Then an engine to "render" the glyphs into approximations using straight lines and arcs (for the outline) followed by holes (and possibly shapes within those holes, as there are quite likely languages that will need this). All of this while avoiding illegal overlaps in verticies as they may occur after rounding, even rounding as a result of progressive processing on a single contour! (See ยง4.4.8 of the spec, page 58 for one example of this.) To make this even more fun, it would seem that there would also be a need to render the font on-screen that way as well, so that we can actually see what we're going to get. I suppose, that that part won't be as difficult as the actual conversion into a gerber-compatible format, although it sounds like it may be a pain. For example, if rendering straight to opengl, you can't draw convex polygons, you have to break them into triangles, etc. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/668145 Title: Font preferences not available anymore, internal font changed To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/668145/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
