Stroke font doesn't contain all unicode characters (c.f. Hebrew, Arabic, CJK, etc.)

[nobody]

i cant seem to write hebrew labels in the linux version

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

What is the issue, currently?

[Blair Bonnett (bcb)]

My guess is the original report was referring to the lack of some Unicode blocks in the font used to render text in Eeschema and Pcbnew.

For example, a net label or text item in Eeschema can display the letter é (U+00E9). However, the Hebrew letter א (Alef, U+05D0) shows OK in the edit box (i.e., the wxWidgets text entry can show it), but it renders as a 'missing character' box on the schematic itself.

The same thing is the case in Pcbnew (both legacy and GAL).

I'm not sure if there are any plans for the font rendering (e.g., to allow the use of arbitrary system fonts, which would move the issue away from KiCad to whatever font the user chooses), or if this requires somebody to draw the missing characters and add them to the newstroke setup.

BTW, I found an assertion in the netlist code while importing non-ASCII characters. I've reported this separately as bug 1470078. Of course, this may have been the issue the original report was referring to, but we need two separate reports either way.

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

OK.

The stroke font in Kicad does not cover all letters.
It was created by vladimir uryvaev, a Russian contributor (Thanks).
It can be extended, but this work needs a volunteer.

See <kicad sources>/helpers/tools_to_build_newstroke-font for info

In Pcbnew, using stroke fonts is mandatory, because the Gerber output does not know what is a font, and moreover text sizes must be *perfectly* controlled.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

Bob Cousins did some work on a CJK stroke-font here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1690296.

[Oleg Endo (oleg.endo)]

It would be really great to have full unicode rendering support. For example, it would allow adding notes to the gerber files in Chinese to make it easier for the PCB house.

What's the actual problem here? Lack of appropriate font? Missing unicode string handling in the code?

Is anybody working on this issue already?

[taotieren (taotieren)]

This question has been raised for 10 years with regard to support for Chinese characters in PCB and schematics.
If this problem can be solved, more Chinese users will use KiCad.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

Fixed in revision 3a35c75d0930ef25a21c9f09df0721c4ff48211d
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=3a35c75d0930ef25a21c9f09df0721c4ff48211d

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

@taotieren- I've added standard CJK code pages. However, I am unable to verify that they make sense beyond checking that the code pages appear valid to my eye when compared with the wikipedia lists at [1]. If you could give these a look over, I'd greatly appreciate it.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_Unified_Ideographs,_part_1_of_4

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

Resetting to Triaged as there are remaining Unicode characters not yet addressed.

[Julian DeMille (juliandemille)]

It appears Greek characters (µ, Ω) are still not supported. See attached image for example.

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

This issue is now closed.

To follow future work, please use https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/issues/1959

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1959