Some questions about the LFF fonts

Hi,

I'm the main developer of LibrePCB and I'm looking for a vector font which can be used in PCBs to make Gerber export possible (only straight lines and arcs are allowed).

I found several existing fonts, for example:
- Hershey
- NewStroke
- QCad CXF
- LibreCAD LFF

As the first two do not support arcs, they don't look really nice, so I don't like to use them in LibrePCB.
The CXF and LFF look pretty nice because they support arcs and even allow to let characters inherit from other characters which saves space in the font files.

But I still have several questions, maybe someone of you could help me here?
- Why has LibreCAD introduced LFF instead of using CXF?
- What's the difference between CXF and LFF?
- Is there any documentation about the LFF file format?
- Are you satisfied with LFF or would you change something to make it better?

If I'm not mistaken, the license of most of your LFF files should be compatible with GPLv3 and thus could also be used in LibrePCB (which is GPLv3). But the source code of your parser (rs_mtext.cpp) is GPLv2 and thus probably not compatible with GPLv3(?).

Actually I wonder why there isn't a good "standalone" free vector font project which could be used in many other projects (e.g. QCad, LibreCAD, LibrePCB, KiCad, and many other CADs). There are many projects which require vector fonts. Maybe I will create such a standalone project instead of embedding it in the source code of LibrePCB. If I created a standalone LFF font parser, would you be interested in using this also in LibreCAD?

I would love to see some discussion about vector fonts here :)

Regards

CONTENTS DELETED

Hi Ries,

Many thanks for your response!
Now I have some more information which helps to decide how to proceed with my project :)

R. van Twisk wrote

gerber file formats (does that even exist still???)

Yes, (unfortunately) Gerber is still the de facto standard for PCB production data, and it is even still under active development ;) And because Gerber does not have any support for fonts, we need to convert texts to polylines. But TTF is extremely complex and thus a pain to convert it into polylines, so a simple stroke font makes sense here.

R. van Twisk wrote

A stand aline parser can welcome, at least as a lib??

Of course it would be developed as a library. I would need to integrate it into my C++ project then.

Regards,
Urban