I have KiCAD v4.0.7. I need to translate the schema file into DXF. How to make sure that in a convertible DXF file labels are displayed not by lines, but by ordinary ASCII inscriptions, which can then be edited. And in the PCB editor, when translating a file to DXF, there is an option to use single-line ASCII text, and in EESCHEMA there are no such options.
Looking at the EESCHEMA outputs, it looks like everything (PDF/DXF/SVG/HPGL) is managed as a pen-plotter like output, and the PDF manages text search, by the common ‘trick’ of ‘embed of invisible text’.
( ie additional text that searches, but does not print)
If you take a PDF and carefully look at the find/select highlights they do not quite match the printed chars.
This is done to preserve an exact plot, & avoids justify/font/rotate/overbar type issues but it does mean downstream information is not so easy to manage…
To see what is possible, I created a PDF and loaded that into LibreOffice Draw - this shows the invisible text, which now ghosts the stroke font, and then I moved some TEXT to check what it manages.
ie looks like BOLD is even ok, but Italic is not supported
Of course, this is not great graphically, but it does show what is possible, and maybe you can experiment with PDF as a means for external editing ?
If the editing is OK, it may be relatively easy to have EESCHEMA create PDF without the layering, ie disable the stroke output, and switch the hidden PDF to visible.
It does look like the justify is done reasonably well ?
Hmm, as I suspected, overbars are not managed at all, they simply drop from the PDF font-text.
Guess it depends how common those are to your usage ?
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