Stickfonts

Hello,

First o all for the people that celebrate New Year around this time, a Happy new Year and the best wishes for 2011! May the source be with us…

I need your help with something. LibreCAD comes by default with a set of stickfonts. However there are some symbols that are not available in these stickfonts, for example Ñ and ñ and possible many others, we have also some entries in the bugtracker revering to these missing characters. Now these stick fonts are not my strongest point so my questions are:

  1. Does anybody know where to fint these stickfonts with all characters?
  2. Can we use UTF-8 within DXF files and use utf-8 compatible stickfonts?
  3. If the stickfonts can be utf-8 and the DXF files awell, can we remove some stickfonts and/or combine them somehow?

Let me know your thoughts about this.

Ries

8 thoughts on “Stickfonts

  1. Hi !
    I had the same issue, stroke fonts needed for a specific application. It is pretty difficult to find some free ones, but I managed. There is a set of stroke fonts made by Hershey for old plotters that is re-distributable (see specific license here : http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/current/Hershey.htm ) and present in ghostscript. I have built a transformation script but the destination format is proprietary, and the script is in ocaml. If you are interested nonetheless, send me an email, it is not very likely I will read the new comments on this post (you are in my RSS feed). If you cannot find the files, I can also send them, just let me know where to.
    Good luck.
    From a former QCad user 😉

    • Hey,

      I looked up the Hershey fonts and this seems very interesting. However, I couldn’t find a TTF version of it so I can create a cxf for LibreCAD, or may be I am looking into the wrong direction.

      Care to shine a light one this??

      Ries

        • Fish,

          I think they can’t be converted to TTF because TTF is a outline sort of font, not a stroke type of font, I came to that conclusion after reading lot’s of material on the net about this. So the conversion needs to be done though a other system.
          Now, the CXF font that LibreCAD (and QCad) is using is not at all difficult, it just need to be made. However, that should only be done if the stickfont in question really contains the needed characters, anybody know about stick/stroke fonts with Russian, Chinese etc etc character sets, just like TTF fonts?

          Ries

  2. Also note that the indexes for the Hershey fonts are completely off ( I do not think UTF-8 existed when these fonts have been done ) and I am unsure if the standard font formats (TTF, ITF, etc.) do support stroke fonts.

  3. Sorry to comment this so late but here it is: 8-bit ASCII, and by a likely extension UTF-8, break the current DXF reader in Blender, for example. Some commercial applications output such files containing Autodesk-specification breaking characters. Those can be manually fixed with a text editor in most cases.

    • Have you tried RC1?

      We have been working around that area. We have seen the same aswell, some applications output UTF-8, other output unicode.

      LibreCAD can read both (it’s a bit of trickery) but will always write unicode.

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