Give kicad a try: sudo apt install kicad . I just installed it on my Linux box, and it looks good: extensive component library, intuitive interface, good context menus. The only real shortcoming, perhaps, is the effort that might be required to go from a schematic to a GIF or PNG file that can be posted in the forum. It can produce an SVG file, but that's not supported here.
That depends on your distro and desktop environment. For example I take gnome, then you start gnome-appearance-properties and select the fonts tab you can see if it is enabled. On some systems it will not really have the desired effect if the corresponding packages for subpixel hinting are not installed (this is one of the odd things in software patents that this feature was patented but this expired recently, so if you use debian there is a good chance it is not fully available by default even if you can set the settings, the same was/is true for opensuse which I use, I had to add some extra packages to get good looking fonts).
You can just try it to see if playing around with the settings on this tabs improves the appearance (it has only effect on a program if you stop it and start it again).
OK thanks for the tip. Playing around with my font settings in KDE on Debian makes no appreciable difference. Looks like it takes more effort than it's worth, almost any other monospace font looks quite OK.
You could just scan the handwritten schematic to a JPG and just post that without worrying about a schematic capture program... Take a picture with a hires camera works great also...
Heater,
it maybe that what you do not like is that the parallax font itself is not that brilliant on linux (I do not know how it looks on windows) and not just hinting, if your other fonts look good. I use dejavu sans mono in bst and switch only to the parallax font when I open a file with some circuit diagrams in it. I do not consider the parallax font as absolutely ugly as you described it but compared to dejavu it is not that great.
The Parallax font looks fine on my Linux box -- at least in OpenOffice. I did not install the one that Parallax provides, though, but rather the "tweaked" font found here:
I wanted to try it with bst, but couldn't find any installation instructions for Linux. Now I may be a complete Linux idiot without apt, but what am I supposed to do with the file bst.linux once I've extracted it?
Did you copy the font to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ ? Yo need to run then (as root) fc-cache -f -v.
Run bst.linux and from the menu tools->ide preferences, press the editor font button and choose the parallax font.
Edit: Argh, sorry I misunderstood your question.
bst.linux is a executable. Copy it to /usr/local/bin and type bst.linux then the application starts.
With BST running in Linux, the "tweaked" font looks fine, with or without smoothing. It even scales well across various point sizes, which is more than I can say for the "standard" font in Windows. One problem I see, though, is that the special schematic characters do not join together, either horizontally or vertically, but have gaps between them. This would make bst.linux unsuitable for producing schematics.
This would make bst.linux unsuitable for producing schematics.
Do you mean schematics in general. I started to have a look at gEDA and playing with gschem (which is part of it) for drawing circuits. It is too early for me to really say how good it fits, but so far it seems to be what I wanted.
What I meant was that, because the characters did not join side-to-side or top-to-bottom in BST, that the BST app in Linux is unsuitable for producing schematics that can be screen-captured and uploaded to the forum. However, that's not to say that the schematic can't be cut and pasted directly into a code box, specifying [noparse] after the
Comments
Give kicad a try: sudo apt install kicad . I just installed it on my Linux box, and it looks good: extensive component library, intuitive interface, good context menus. The only real shortcoming, perhaps, is the effort that might be required to go from a schematic to a GIF or PNG file that can be posted in the forum. It can produce an SVG file, but that's not supported here.
-Phil
How would I make it so?
You can just try it to see if playing around with the settings on this tabs improves the appearance (it has only effect on a program if you stop it and start it again).
OK thanks for the tip. Playing around with my font settings in KDE on Debian makes no appreciable difference. Looks like it takes more effort than it's worth, almost any other monospace font looks quite OK.
it maybe that what you do not like is that the parallax font itself is not that brilliant on linux (I do not know how it looks on windows) and not just hinting, if your other fonts look good. I use dejavu sans mono in bst and switch only to the parallax font when I open a file with some circuit diagrams in it. I do not consider the parallax font as absolutely ugly as you described it but compared to dejavu it is not that great.
I wanted to try it with bst, but couldn't find any installation instructions for Linux. Now I may be a complete Linux idiot without apt, but what am I supposed to do with the file bst.linux once I've extracted it?
-Phil
Run bst.linux and from the menu tools->ide preferences, press the editor font button and choose the parallax font.
Edit: Argh, sorry I misunderstood your question.
bst.linux is a executable. Copy it to /usr/local/bin and type bst.linux then the application starts.
With BST running in Linux, the "tweaked" font looks fine, with or without smoothing. It even scales well across various point sizes, which is more than I can say for the "standard" font in Windows. One problem I see, though, is that the special schematic characters do not join together, either horizontally or vertically, but have gaps between them. This would make bst.linux unsuitable for producing schematics.
-Phil
tag[/noparse], as shown below: [code][font=parallax] ┌───── rhipins xhipins ─────┐  ┌─ rfbpin  Audio Inp ──╋─╋─── rcvpin xmtpin ─┳─╋──┳─ Audio Out   │ │ └─── rlopins xlopins ───┘ │  2.2K └───── rlopins xlopins ─────┘ │ xenpin ────────  [/font]This is still a painful way to produce schematics, though, especially when so many better options abound.
-Phil
-Phil
You can have your thread back. Sorry about taking it so far off.