What was the fix? Because I’m seeing the same 0.32mm clearance as originally reported in that thread, after making sure the Clearance Resolution was 0mm.
There is a difference between the values/pictures in the old thread and yours:
old thread: all clearance-numbers are shown for horizontal text. There the clearance was calculated as line-spacing+ text-clearance
your picture: you have rotated your text and now show the clearance from the first letter to the copper - so this is the perpendicular side of the original question. In this case the letter-spacing is taken into account.
This is only intended as explanation, I have no idea if this current situation is correct or not.
And then with the text changed to ~{gggg} and the zone refilled.
This is just done on the F.Cu layer in a standalone instance of pcbnew 7.0.2, so font is default: “KiCad Font”; width 1.5mm; height 1.5mm; thickness: 0.3mm.
Sorry, I realised that’s a pretty crappy example because you can’t set clearances to 0 without a project. So here’s a new MWE! Same as before but with a schematic (consisting of a testpoint on GND) and clearances set to 0.
try to update to 7.0.4 the next days (if it’s available for your system). For overbar-text there was a bug with too much distance between overbar and copper. This was fixed.
I think the bugfixes from your linked thread are all in place, because the measured distances are smaller than in the original kicad v6-thread
nevertheless I think there is room for improvement - the distance text-copper is not always equally spaced. For instance if I use only small letters - than there is too much space on the top.
But this seems to be not an easy task - there were numerous code-additions regarding this topic.
it may help to use custom fonts - the clearance-calculation for such system-fonts seems much better. However, I personally discourage from that solution - it opens new possibilities for problems (different machines with different or partly not installed fonts)
If you want the distance text-copper behaviour improved than you have to open a additional issue. With multiple text-examples in the zone (lower letters, big letters, with/without overbar).
I guess that’s the bit that’s not apparent to a user. As mentioned in the original thread: how small? Under what conditions? Small is okay, but definable is better.
Maybe. See next point.
I can only imagine! Really appreciate the insight and great to hear of the effort that goes into this. But I don’t want to suggest I’m asking for more sophisticated text clearance - sounds like a never-ending time suck. Is there a win-win here where default clearance errs on the side of too tight and the user defines their preference with a rule area? Or just do away with default clearance all together and require the user set a rule area if they’re going to overlap with a zone? Text is hard. Vector-perfect clearance would be great, but I guess if I wanted vector-level integration, I’d convert it to vectors.
Good to know.
I’m probably overlooking some important details and use cases here. But my 2c to consider.
