Design Spark and others – TTF Support?

[Chris56000]

Hi!

I have just tried drawing the schematic for a basic Z80 CPU module for my friend in Design Spark 8.1.1., but, like Kicad, the default vector stroke font is bloody atrocious!

I tried modifying the Design Technology Setup Files to use Gill Sans MT, but this software cannot handle it properly – when you try to print out a drawing where True Type Fonts have been used, letters run together into an indicipherable blob, or go mis–shapen etc!

There were only two pieces of Schematic Diagram Software I've ever used that properly handle T.T. fonts on schematics, one was "Quickroute 5.0", the other being Abacom's sPlan 7.0., but sPlan doesn't "capture" the schematic., only draw it!

Short of using an ancient copy of Orcad or DXP, is there anything that can draw publication–quality schematics that also acts as a capture program, or am I looking at an am arm and a leg cost?

Before anyone mentions Kicad, that's another vector–font only program and the default font is awful!

What's involved in providing accurate (and printable/zoomable correctly!) T.T.F. support in a pcb program?

Quickroute 5.0 got it right, and it's successor Electronics Design studio did as well, but I can't find my old Quickroute disc!

To give you an idea of what goes wrong in Design Spark, I labelled some buttons/switches with 120 mil high Gill Sans MT with a rectangle round them – this is a very common way of highlighting control functions on diagrams – but when I printed them out to fit on A4 landscape, the letters overflowed outside the box, or jumbled up and distorted.

Chris Williams

[Wilksey]

Are you looking to do this in Free versions of software?
Not sure if Circuit Maker would do what you want?
EAGLE seems to have 3 built in fonts for Schematics.
NI Multisim has TTF support (Free version you can use Mouser MultiSim Blue)
Pulsonix allows TTF, but I believe is the same as EasyPC / Design Spark, and is not free.

[Chris56000]

PS!

What I am puzzled about tho', is that "Quickroute 5.0" did have reasonable TTF support,  and was the predessor of "Easy PC" and it's free veriant, so what have WestDev broken between Q.R. 5 and Easy PC etc., or am I looking at this in the wrong direction, and actually have a graphicq drivervissue!

The drawing my first post referred to was done on a Dell Laritude E6410 running W7 with the latest available graphics drivers..

Chris Williams

[Wilksey]

How does it look without drawing the rectangle, does it show jumbled letters in this scenario?

[Wilksey]

I just tried a quick test with a schematic in DS 8.1, and generated a PDF, the attached with text "Test 1" and "Test 2" are Gill Sans MT and 120 size and was "printed" using PDFCreator, and looks OK to me?

[Chris56000]

Hi!!

I've just tried modifying the "analogue circuit" example they supply with the software (a motor controller circuit) with Gill Sans MT @ 150 thou on my pc at work and I must admit the zooming in and out, and printing, of the letters is much better on that compared with my home lappy, however there is still the issue of boxes not sizing in proportion to the text when zooming in/out!

I'd be very interested to know the cause of this "bug" if anyone can give me an insight into it – another Member has also reported silly problems with pin–numbers when orinting to PDF from Altium's flagship Designer product, so even umpteen–thousand–pound software isn't immune to these problems!

The printer I use is a CP2525 Colour Laser using the HP PCL6 Universal Print Driver, by ths way.

Is this a bug I've come across related to TTF fonts worth mentioning to RS?

(Abacom have solved this quite satisfactorily in their SPlan 7.0 tho)'.

i've got an Easy PC licence given me from a previous employer that no longer needed it when they shut the Electronics Dept 8 years ago, but not WestDev's/Number One Systems's Easy–PC V22 upgrade yet!

I would be interested to know if any other Member finds TTF support for schematics flaky on other types of EDA tool as well, by the way!

Chris Williams

Chris Williams

[Wilksey]

Are you sure it is not your system?

I use AD17 and so far I can safely say that it has no issues so far on my machine, been using it for a few years  on this machine (16 before of course), not tried the new 18 yet.

[Chris56000]

Hi!

I don't think it's entirely down to my system, as if I use the double–underscore to precede text I want to "overbar", like a reset–line for example, the line comes miles above the text when you try to use a true–type or open type font, and both my home lappy and work (desktop) pc show these peculiarities, although zooming in/out is much better on a desktop machine.

RS don't seem to provide an OEM–written guide to the software any more,  it's now a much more basic manual written by a third–party, but the original Design Spark book written by West Dev themselves (brown and white logo top RH corner) did have a sentence in the introductory paragraph:-

"Design Spark does not need a well–specified PC to run, any good–quality standard specification machine is sufficent."

Chris Williams

[SiliconWizard]

TinyCAD works fairly well and yields good results for publishing schematics, with truetype fonts. You can export to PNG or EMF (which in turn allows to get SVG or EPS for instance if you import the EMF from software like Inkscape). You'll probably have to design a lot of parts though, as the base libraries are not that good (but certainly usable) and not that big.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/tinycad/

[Wilksey]

Well, Design Spark seems to be OK for me, and so do the other programs.
I am running an i5 4590, 16GB RAM, 1TB mechanical 5200rpm SATA, Windows 8.1 Pro x64 with a 2GB GTX 750 Ti if that helps compare with your system?

[dmills]

Fonts are **HARD**, far more so then you would think was reasonable.

The basics begin with the fact that the shapes of the glyphs change with scale (a 6 point font is NOT a scaled down 24 point one), so things like bounding boxes tend to change in ways that are not inherently a linear function of scale.

Then we get the fact that printers often have their own built in font sets (it reduces the amount of data that must be transmitted to the printer), but the printers built in font rasteriser can be both buggy and sometimes prone to doing silly things like ignoring overall scale factors.

Now if the PC does the font rasterisation and sends effectively a bitmap to the printer (possibly scaled) then you get a scaled version of whatever the font defined for the appropriate glyphs at the original scale (Which may not look all that good scaled), where if the system send the printer a command, "This string, this font, that size, over there" then the printer will do the rasterisation at whatever the appropriate output size is, potentially using a DIFFERENT set of font tables due to the size change..... The whole thing is a can of wyrms.

Now add fun like the combining ligatures and ligature substitutions required to write some far eastern languages, and welcome to hell, this shit is hard.

This is made harder by the fact that if you are printing to say PDF, it is nice if the text on the document is selectable and searchable which means the 'printer' has to get the text and not a picture, while a real printer is usually better fed postscript that contains a pixel accurate picture of whatever you want, but not the original test strings.

The fact that text tends to be an afterthought given to the interns to code up does not exactly help.

Regards, Dan.

[Chris56000]

Hi'

Dan, thanks for that!

That would suggest to me that sPlan 7.0,  works because they "rasterise" the font glyphs,  and they go to the screen and print drivers as mathematically calculated points as part and parcel of the main drawing, so providing the glyph calculations were correct in the drawing software to begin with, they will remain correct when zoomed in/out or scaled!

On the other hand, I suspect Design Spark and others whose font rendering isn't brilliant simply calls up routines in the graphics and print drivers to call them from a pre–built character table in the graphics and print drivers, so font plotting is only as good as what the drivers can render, am I correct?

This might explain why Abacom's sPlan 8.0., promised for four years now, with full Unicode (& Cyrillic!) Character Support hasn't materialised yeto!

Chris Williams

[dmills]

That would suggest to me that sPlan 7.0,  works because they "rasterise" the font glyohs,  and they go to the screen and print drivers as mathematically calculated points as part and parcel of the main drawing, so providing the glyph calculations were correct in the drawing software to begin with , they will remain correct when zoomed in/out or scaled!

That depends on what you mean by 'correct', a scaled down 24 point glyph SHOULD NOT IN GENERAL be identical to a 6 point version of the same glyph... So while scaling a picture kind of makes sense for some things it sucks for others. A Gerber should not generally be scaled (it is a defined size), and if you do to fit it on the screen or page for example, it should be treated as a picture, while a schematic sheet should be re rendered from its vector form at whatever scale applies, looking good if far more important then absolute dimensional accuracy for the schematic.

You really need very different rendering pipelines for screen Vs print, and that is a problem because for most packages print is very much an afterthought.

This might explain why Abacom's sPlan 8.0., promised for four years now, with full Unicode (& Cyrillic!) Character Support hasn't materialised yet!

No bet!

Full unicode is **HARD**, the basic multilingual plane is not too nasty, but Urdu for example has well over 10,000 combining ligatures, and some languages have different glyphs depending on where in a word the glyph appears!

Regards, Dan.