Is there a PCB-CAD package on the market - with eternal licensing?

[Simon]

They say font changes will come in version 6 so that any font will be supported in the usual way, I wish the font was not so thin and the bold is too thick but it's not a major problem. It's a program funded by donations but is being developed and I personally have seen a bug I submitted fixed in days. Circuit studio has cost me so far over £1'000, I paid for an update that turned out not to be an update but just rearranging the ornaments on the mantlepiece and I gave up waiting for the next promised update. The answer to everything the program could not sensibly do was: of course you can do it, just follow this long winded procedure that only I the guy at farnell support knows about and now you too and meh, if you can't remember it that's a shame. Oh and KiCad works on 4k monitors natively unlike the pixelated crap that CS is.

[JohnnyMalaria]

What is not possible, and unlikely to arrive for quite a while if ever, is the ability to take an arbitrary TrueType font and use that on a PCB.

Ooh...Comic Sans

[Simon]

Comic Neue

[kony]

Mentor did bit dirty move lately, as the "perpetual" licenses now mean "we will send you new activation keys each year to each few years for the lastest version you paid mainentance for, even if you are not on active subscription anymore", and all the license keys have build in timeout now. This applies both to nodelocked and mobile compute (USB dongle key). I was not happy to find out either.

IMO, this is done to prevent any licenses trasfers out of control of official distribution channels, but is the most harsh way I had seen implemented by anyone by far.

[Simon]

So it's a perpetually given rental licence. Not the same. This means if they ever think they can wriggle out of the perpetual licences they have given they can switch right over to renting you the software.

[kony]

No. EULA, purchase order, invoice - everything says perpetual. Just that you are at their mercy of giving you new license keys you are eligible for as timeout has been build in into all keys. Annualy for corps on active subscription service, with longer period if you are without. Better to understand it as very annoying manual activation process with aim to check for legitimacy of the end user.

[nctnico]

I got, thanks to help from the UK Vintage Radio Forum Mods, Digitised versions of the British Standards and Post Office recommended sets of lettering styles, and this clinched "Easy–PC" for me – it can use them in the PCB Editor and they worked absolutely perfect when I got JLC PCB to make a design using these Fonts on the silkscreen!

Are those fonts in the form of bitmaps or TrueType fonts, or 'stroke' format? I gather KiCad uses stroke fonts for PCB layout, so they can be converted easily to Gerber. If you have your own stroke font it should be possible to replace the default - apparently there are format conversion tools in the source code.

What is not possible, and unlikely to arrive for quite a while if ever, is the ability to take an arbitrary TrueType font and use that on a PCB.

AFAIK Altium can do that. In the end you can render a font as strokes just like a polygon.

[nigelwright7557]

PCBCAD720 has a perpetual license.

[Simon]

PCBCAD720 has a perpetual license.

I and most of the forum tire of you trying to sell us your one man band software whilst acting all innocent and failing to declare you are the maker of it. If my patience wears thin enough I will do something about it!

[nctnico]

PCBCAD720 has a perpetual license.

I and most of the forum tire of you trying to sell us your one man band software whilst acting all innocent and failing to declare you are the maker of it. If my patience wears thin enough I will do something about it!

Maybe he didn't like this review and decided to do another spam-run on the forum:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/eda/pcbpcad51pcbpcad720-review/

[Uky]

Using Cadence OrCAD/Allegro with a USB hardware lock. The license tied to the dongle expires 2100.
That should suffice...

The Gerber fonts used for Layout (PCB Editor) is stroked. The "generic" setting is not very aestetically pleasing, but the proportions hight vs width as well as intercharacter spacing and photo width can be modified. The schematic editor uses vector graphics for circuit elements and Windows fonts for texts that can be changed. In order to easy differentiate between "0" and "O" I have downloaded "Andale Mono" and defined that font for the schematic editor.

[CJay]

When the employer closed the Electronics Department ten years ago, they gave me the "Easy PC" licence they no longer needed, and the girl at Number One was happy for me to continue to use it to buy a V24 Upgrade just before Christmas – that's how this software should be licenced – fairly priced and no compulsory subscription nonsense, insistence on your design files becoming "their" property (Are you listening Altium?), or reliance on "dongles", "key disks" or "activation".

God I used to love EasyPC, must have designed a hundred or so boards with their DOS version.

The DOS Autorouter was pretty OK too, it was a decent 'starting point' by which i mean I could lay out the parts on a board with a few dozen chips, it would then make a spirited attempt at routing it and I'd polish off the rest/re-route a few poorly placed tracks. 

[AndersJ]

The license tied to the dongle expires 2100.
That should suffice...

Yes, it should suffice,
if the vendor is still alive and kicking when the dongle breaks, or is lost.
If not,
you are on your own, and the expiration date means nothing.

[SilverSolder]

[...]
I also own a Volvo car.
I can use it as much as I want,
without asking Volvo for permission every year.
[...]

For now!  -  There is already a trend of GPS monitored insurance and so on...  can only be a matter of time until it is required that all cars are monitored "for security reasons" etc.

[srb1954]

Mentor did bit dirty move lately, as the "perpetual" licenses now mean "we will send you new activation keys each year to each few years for the lastest version you paid mainentance for, even if you are not on active subscription anymore", and all the license keys have build in timeout now. This applies both to nodelocked and mobile compute (USB dongle key). I was not happy to find out either.

IMO, this is done to prevent any licenses trasfers out of control of official distribution channels, but is the most harsh way I had seen implemented by anyone by far.

Mentor has had licenses that time out for a long time.

Where I was working at in the late 80's they used Mentor S/W and new license codes were sent out at the end of every year. One year Mentor forgot and when everyone got back to work in the new year the entire PCB design team had to sit round for a week twiddling their thumbs waiting for Mentor to deliver some new licenses codes.

[asmi]

AFAIK Altium can do that. In the end you can render a font as strokes just like a polygon.

Yes it can, and I think this is a major feature, despite being dismissed by people who only know English language. UTF-8 support is a must, and it's real shame that so few eCADs support it.

[nctnico]

AFAIK Altium can do that. In the end you can render a font as strokes just like a polygon.

Yes it can, and I think this is a major feature, despite being dismissed by people who only know English language. UTF-8 support is a must, and it's real shame that so few eCADs support it.

The alternative is to import an image (which Orcad Allegro can do) but it isn't very convenient.

[asmi]

The alternative is to import an image (which Orcad Allegro can do) but it isn't very convenient.

That is a really bad alternative - TT fonts are vector-bases, and so are Gerbers, but the image is not. There is always loss of information in conversions.

[olkipukki]

How about: TT font -> DFX each character -> OrCAD 'Alphabet' library, no fussing with images

[asmi]

How about: TT font -> DFX each character -> OrCAD 'Alphabet' library, no fussing with images

Each of 1M+ UTF-8 symbols? Doesn't sound like a sensible option to me.

[PlainName]

How about: TT font -> DFX each character

Don't think that would work since the TT font data describes the outline and the DFX describes the centreline (which you want for plotting/milling with gcode/gerbers/etc).

[nctnico]

How about: TT font -> DFX each character

Don't think that would work since the TT font data describes the outline and the DFX describes the centreline (which you want for plotting/milling with gcode/gerbers/etc).

Well, Orcad Allegro does allow to create pads from shapes (which are outlines). IIRC it is possible to scale these in the padstack editor as well.

[PlainName]

Sure, but Orcad knows how to convert the outline of a pad to something that can be manufactured. The point is that it doesn't know how or what to do when presented with a normal font. Unless you are hinting rather too subtly that you can do something like tell Orcad this font is a pad and - voila - there's your flash text rendered without any further messing about 

[cgroen]

PCBCAD720 has a perpetual license.

I checked the PCBCAD720 website just to see what it is about, the price seemed ok, but when scrolling down to see the screenshots, I think I know why it is cheap (and yes, even though I'm not "native English speaking" I know the difference between "cheap" and "affordable") 

[nctnico]

Sure, but Orcad knows how to convert the outline of a pad to something that can be manufactured. The point is that it doesn't know how or what to do when presented with a normal font. Unless you are hinting rather too subtly that you can do something like tell Orcad this font is a pad and - voila - there's your flash text rendered without any further messing about 

You'd have to place the text as individual pads manually. OTOH Allegro does have scripting abilities. It might be possible to construct a script which takes a text string and places the font-pads automatically. I have not looked into Allegro's scripting abilities at all however so I might be wrong.