Add Chinese text in eeschema and pcbnew

[erusyd]

system: Debian wheezy i386 32 bits
KiCad: (2012-apr-16-27)-stable
I find that Chinese text objects become garbled in both eeschema and pcbnew. Does kicad support Chinese text label? Or will it support this feature in near future?

[Dick Hollenbeck (dickelbeck)]

On 07/05/2012 06:32 PM, erusyd wrote:
> ** Description changed:
>
> - I find that Chinese text objects become garbled in both eeschema and
> - pcbnew. Does kicad support Chinese text label? Or will it support this
> - feature in near future?
> + system: Debian wheezy i386 32 bits
> + KiCad: (2012-apr-16-27)-stable
> + I find that Chinese text objects become garbled in both eeschema and pcbnew. Does kicad support Chinese text label?

It probably loads the text OK, but due to font limitations cannot display it. There is a
special vectorized font mechanism in both programs: Pcbnew and Eeschema, which limit the
displayable characters to those which are coded.

> Or will it support this feature in near future?

No way to tell if a "Chinese literate" programmer is going to submit an acceptable patch,
but if I had to guess about "soon" per your question, my guess would be no.

[Lorenzo Marcantonio (l-marcantonio)]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2012 at 01:45:46PM -0000, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> special vectorized font mechanism in both programs: Pcbnew and Eeschema, which limit the
> displayable characters to those which are coded.

> > Or will it support this feature in near future?

> No way to tell if a "Chinese literate" programmer is going to submit an acceptable patch,
> but if I had to guess about "soon" per your question, my guess would be no.

The only 'real' solution for this would be using a truetype rasterizer (which is not *too* difficult to implement, I did some experiment in the past and results were good) but at the moment there is too much dependance on the embedded font metrics and no way of specifying/switching font.

That or someone compiling a chinese hershey font :D (the original repertoire does contain some kanji but I have no idea on how much of it could be useful for chinese)

--
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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