EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => KiCad => Topic started by: johnboxall on April 17, 2023, 04:33:17 am
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The KiCad project is proud to announce the latest version 7 bug fix release - https://www.kicad.org/blog/2023/04/KiCad-7.0.2-Release/ (https://www.kicad.org/blog/2023/04/KiCad-7.0.2-Release/)
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. . .And at long last, KiCAD 7 brings the TTF/System Font support I was hoping for!
Just out of curiosity, what is the physically largest and most complex KiCAD board that is available on the internet as a documented design file rather than simply a screenshot?
I have a physically very large board to design when I get home from my sister's visit next week, alas to say not very exciting in hardware terms, altho' physically large, it's very simple thro' hole components on 100 mil grid multiples! – it's a "Convergence Control Panel" for a vintage 1967 colour TV it's owner wants to restore!
Peter Dalmaris's latest book for KiCad 7 suggests the available features are catching up with expensive tools like OrCAD and Altium very rapidly!
Chris Williams
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. . .And at long last, KiCAD 7 brings the TTF/System Font support I was hoping for!
I was waiting for that as well, but note that currently KiCad's handling of TTF fonts is very slow and makes opening schematics (including switching sheets, which makes it more obvious) much slower.
This is a known issue that I can't tell whether the maintainers will be able to address any time soon.
Also, the graphic rendering is not super great (at least compared to native rendering of fonts) as it's rendered by OpenGL and probably characters are transformed into purely graphical objects (as for the standard KiCad font), which would explain both the relative slowness and the "meh" rendering. Fonts are hard to render. I was hoping that text would be optionally rendered natively, but I guess it wouldn't fit at all the view model of KiCad's schematics (and PCBs.)
So, while the feature is great, the result for now may not be as good as you'd expect, at least from a UI POV. But for printing/exporting schematics for publishing purposes, and for custom fonts on PCBs, it's great to have.