Does Kicad supply font characters such as Ω and µ.?

Hi @Maverick17

I edited your Title to reflect your question. This will help others searching the forum for answers to this question.

@retiredfeline

The OS I use offers a two click keyboard change to make symbols such as Ω, µ, ©, °, K, ĸ, ⅞, ™ very easy.

When I say OS, in the case of Linux, it also depends on the desktop. I use the Compose key method as it handles the vast majority of my needs like typing accented characters in other languages, the ° symbol for temperatures and GPS coordinates to Maps, and fractions like ⅔ which are typed as Compose, 2, 3. For less common characters I can bring up kcharselect which gives access to the whole Unicode shebang (is there a hebang? :crazy_face:). For emojis, I can bring up the emoji selector popup. :+1: So there are plenty of existing solutions in this space.

Incidentally font is not needed in the title, as characters have an independent existence to their graphical depiction.

You also robbed OP of their second question in your title.

Sometimes it is necessary to cater for the unwashed?

That’s a problem. Any suggestions?

Copy the original post to a new topic, and suppress the first question in that, don’t know if this is possible. Or tell them to repost and not put too many questions in one topic. :wink:

A post was split to a new topic: How to change the Origin

Yep!

Press the “select” button to select one or a number of individual posts; not the “select + below” button.

For a bit of fun for those on Linux, try the sequence Compose LLAP. You should get :vulcan_salute:.

I always forget the character combinations, but in Linux Gnome, there is the Characters application that can be easily opened and searched for characters (it remembers the latest used ones). In Windows, there is a similar application, Character Map.

Strangely, the ohm sign has its own character in Unicode, U+2126, but this doesn’t work well in different applications such as KiCAD. As mentioned above, it is better to use the Greek letter Ω, which is U+03A9.

I use KCharSelect on Linux and used the Character accessory on Windows for all special characters. Never bothered to learn the key combinations.

Note that KiCad provides no preview of text in the font you’ve selected (be it the KiCad font or a TTF one if using v7), so you only see if the font supports a given character when you validate the text. A bit tedious for some special characters that are not ultra-common. A text preview with the selected font would be an appreciated addition. I don’t know if it’s planned for v8, or planned at all.

Just for completeness: On Win10+ the emoji picker [win] + [.] has a special char tab.
grafik

4 Likes

Personally I would try to avoid using these sort of suffixes. Whilst they are generally ok in KiCad, any external scripts may not be so tolerant. Some time back I had a BOM which included resistors with Ω symbols - this caused major confusion and corruption of a Python script that processed it.

1 Like

I have seen one schematic, drawn and edited by a team, that had µ,u and mm in it.

I wonder how you have seen our design, it’s confidential.

4 Likes

yup, unfortunately ASCII-7 still rules… and even a kicad (v5.1) will mangle these characters in say Excel

My attitude is that one should boycott (or girlcott :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) applications that don’t support Unicode in this day and age, but I know this is not always feasible.

5 Likes

Unless doing some very specific text processing on the values, if just copied around verbatim, UTF-8 should not break anything compared to pure ASCII. BOM tools choking on UTF-8 should be burnt. But in particular if done with something as high-level as Python, not handling UTF-8 properly is just unexcusable. :no_mouth:

But of course, one has to get some perspective. If we are talking about recent software, this is unexcusable, but if we are talking about software that is over 10-year old, that may be another story.

1 Like

UTF-8 can be a security risk as there have been issues, such as phishing sites with look-a-like UTF-8 characters being substituted to make URLs look correct

1 Like

Yes (at least on windows)
I just added a silkscreen text box with the degree and micro sign.

The degree sign is Alt +0176
The micro sign is Alt + 0181
Not sure the Alt code for ohms sign but you can just copy this: Ω

image

Not only that, there is a CVE associated with UTF-8 due to RTL recoding such that a load of application then had to flag when such char are used as they could be used to start (well end) some malicious intent