How to change the default font to denote components in eeschema and pcbnew?
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The ‘font’ currently is hard-coded (still). It consists of straight segments.
We had requests for different fonts and language symbols before and by the replies I remember from the developers they want that as well, but it’s not a high priority item.
In which version can be expected the font change?
Kicad is an open source project mainly programmed by volunteers. Any feature is only implemented if one of these volunteers thinks this feature is worth their time. (In most cases this means they need this feature them selves.)
In addition to this there are the guys from CERN. They have a plan what they want to implement. But for the next release they will work on the new file format and on getting eeschema over to open gl. Plus they always work on better DRC and on making the interactive router more capable.
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Has this changed since?
No, it’s still in the plans for v6 which will be released maybe within couple of years.
Important note: I’m talking about eeschema. The layout part won’t get freely choosable font, simply because everything is graphics.
simply because everything is graphics
Please elaborate
Letters are represented with just line segments. You can’t use normal fonts used in computers (truetype, opentype etc. formats; fonts like Arial, Times etc.). The gerber format which is the most important exported format for KiCad doesn’t support text, it’s only graphics. Basically it should be possible to roughly convert normal font characters to polygons, but I don’t know if it would be worth it.
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I would just like the zero to be more discernable from the letter ‘O’. They could just add a line across or a dot in the middle as is often done to avoid confusion.
You can use the native ability of your machine’s keyboard/fonts… to get some useful characters.
Below screen shows some that were valid (in the eyes of Kicad) and some that were not valid (converted to rectangles and question-marks). I didn’t go through the entire selection, just enough to show here. Thus, you can get ø
EDIT - after more blackcoffee, I went through the full keyboard with the default settings and combinations of Key’s (with Shift and Option keys)… results in Schematic are below…
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