Another Font Conversion Experiment

Took one of our Truetype conversions to SHX and converted it to LFF format. Unlike TTF2LFF, the splines in the Truetypes are not converted to thousands of little lines but are made of arcs that have been curve-fitted to the splines.

Interesting. Could you make and provide Arial as lff? Would like to see how it behaves when exploded and then filled with solid hatch. This works for some lff fonts but produces artefacts in certain zoom levels. These seem not to show in a print out.

Greek_ol:
 

I can't do the full Arial due to copyright issues, but I could do if for one of the freeware clones. Let me see what I can find. Are you hatching each letter individually? or by word?

I did a conversion of a font similar to Helvetica. This is only the uppercase letters. I'm doing these with just a spreadsheet as I haven't written a program yet for the conversion. Seems to hatch correctly - the upper ABCDE was hatched by individual letters and and lower one, by the word. There needs to be a slight adjustment to the letter and word spacing. Not having better control over that is not good.

Long before AutoCAD supported Truetype fonts and since AutoCAD SHX fonts can only have lines a arcs, we created "filled" fonts using a series of vertical lines. As long as the pen width assigned to the text was wide enough, they plotted completely filled. But were a regen hog back in the day. With more modern computers, it's not a problem. I'd like to see what LibreCAD would do with one of those.

This is what that kind of conversion looks like. This was done with a Level 3 connected fill to make the manual conversion easier. These were usually done with a Level 4 unconnected fill. But as I said when a wide enough pen is applied, they print solid and mimic a Truetype fonts.

I hatch by word. It seems to help against artefacts if you hatch by letter, though.
You can have the unexploded text on one layer, copy it to an other, filled text layer and explode and hatch it there. This way you can edit the text if needed.
Only a workaround for drawing titles etc, if you desperately want good looking text. For dimensions stick fonts are good enough.
The method of filling the font with lines is much more convenient of course. But as you say it slows down rendering, and also bloats the font and drawing file size.
Using a lff font consisting of lines and arcs out of your production probably is smaller in file size than librecad's usual line bits only. Maybe also the resulting hatching will be.
So if you manage to find an open source helvetica - like font, convert it to lff and provide it here, it might be a welcome addition to LibreCAD's fonts.

The font files would be bigger, but not the file size - only the regen time. In many cases they may be smaller due to using arcs instead of a series of lines. The number of lines using a fill pattern versus splines exploded to thousands of little lines might be a good trade-off. I'll see about an open source font - I could use one of the Truetypes we created in the past and hold the license to.

I'm a little new to Open Source licensing. I'm assuming (scary) that the licensing should read, "This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License".

We had the WenQuanYi fonts removed from LibreCAD, due to licensing confusion. I hope WenQuanYi could be added back. It's huge in size, due to huge number of Chinese characters supported.

Here is a Level 4 Unconnected Fill, which is the one most people found gives a good balance between ease of assigning a pen to make them completely filled and the number of lines. I want to make sure these work before trying to finalize a procedure involving a couple of custom application.