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

[Asterix]

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.

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.

[davidsrsb]

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

[JohnRob]

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

[Naib]

@davidsrsb

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

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

[cflin]

@naib, @Maverick17, and others: If you use UTF-8, you may run into problems. I raised a similar issue for KiCAD4, six years ago, because it converted UTF-8 in net names to question marks in the IPC-D-356 netlist. If you read that thread, one of the developers said that was explicitly the intended behavior. I don’t think that has changed.

IPC-D-356 Output not UTF-8 Compliant in 4.0.7

I labeled some nets with strings which include UTF-8 characters outside the established ASCII set. The UTF-8 characters showed up fine in pcb_new, but in the IPC-D-356 netlist they showed up as question marks. Isn’t KiCAD supposed to be UTF-8 compliant? I am running KiCAD 4.0.7 on Ubuntu 16.04.3LTS.

[Naib]

KiCad does support utf-8 but that does not mean the fileformats do and IPC-D-356 is an old netlist format and thus ASCII-7 is the likely limit

[dennischi]

@hsjmk

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

Also for completeness: on macOS the Character Viewer is invoked using Fn+E or the menu Edit->Emoji & Symbols in most text entry areas. The Character Viewer lets you save favorite symbols for quick access.

[dennischi]

@retiredfeline

boycott (or girlcott )

The etymology of the word boycott is rather interesting Boycott - Wikipedia and has nothing to do with gender.

[BlackCoffee]

Some Examples - Can do a little testing to find Fonts that you want to use… (You’ll see some are Not the best…)

All these are W=H=3mm, Thickness=0.15

[retiredfeline]

@dennischi

boycott

Yes, I know all that. It’s was a person’s name. Etymology is a hobby of mine. It was a joke.

[svgeesus]

Python 2 is now unsupported and Python 3 supports Unicode so I would suggest μ etc are no big deal in practice.

Incidentally, on Windows 11, I typed that Greek mi with Windows key + space, which switched me from US to Greek keyboard (which I happen to have installed, for other reasons). But there are other ways, like copy and paste from the character picker.

[svgeesus]

@davidsrsb

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

The Basic Latin alphabet can also be a security risk, lowercase L and the numeral one are easily or maliciously confused same for upper case O and numeral zero.

Clearly therefore we should all go back to using the Etruscan script. In this essay I will

[jmk]

@svgeesus

The Basic Latin alphabet can also be a security risk, lowercase L and the numeral one are easily or maliciously confused same for upper case O and numeral zero.

Here is another I’ve seen on malicious emails: rn = m as in .corn = .com

In my age group it pays to always wear reading glasses when viewing screens.

[retiredfeline]

Folklore has it that Joe Ossanna of Bell Labs who wrote the Unix typesetting program troff created the word modem by misspelling modern in a paper, but this appears to be a spurious story.

[davidsrsb]

@svgeesus

The Basic Latin alphabet can also be a security risk, lowercase L and the numeral one

Uppercase “i” as well in sans serif fonts.
Password managers sometimes have the option to avoid the use of “I” in the random password generators, losing some entropy in the process