KiCAD Typestyle!!!

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Christopher Williams wrote:

> I'm afraid I'm not very pleased with the revised typestyle for KiCAD introduced in the May 2010 release - it looks too untidy and I don't like the '4'!!!

It's better than the old 'squared' font, and it supports some national
character (most of the accented glyphs IIRC).

> 1) Where KiCAD's font is stored;

It's compiled in the executables, at the moment. There was some thinking
about how to store the fonts but it's low priority

> 2) Point me to developer documentation that will enable me to go about reconfiguring my copyu of KiCAD to use an alternative typestyle!!!

In the source package look in the
/helpers/tools_to_build_newstroke-font, there are the tools to build the
fonts with some documentation.

The font is actually generated from an eeschema library (one part for
glyph), with special 'pins' to mark advance point and accent position.
This is processed by a script which assembles the complete font.

In short, you draw each character in eeschema library editor.

> I have in mind a style of lettering that was used in Practical Wireless/Practical Television from 1948 to about 1960, and as I have a special stencil to write out samples, can anyone explain the principles of KiCAD's lettering to me?

I think you're talking about the 'Leroy' lettering sets...

I also have some tool to help converting .shp/.shx fonts (autocad fonts)
to the kicad format. In fact I already built a whole ISO font (but
licensing is not clear so it's difficult to integrate it). These tools
where created before the converter script so they don't generate
automatically diacritics (of course if the original font contains them
there is no problem)

There is one such font available here (no license information given):
http://www.cadlantic.com/Freebies.htm

If that's the font you need I could try to make a patch from it.

--
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl