Avian’s Blog

Some time ago gEDA moved their source repositories from CVS to Git. I've heard a lot of nice things about Git but so far I stayed away from it since its philosophy (and terminology - for example meaning of words like commits and revisions) is different enough from CVS and SVN that I never quite understood what certain commands did. Yesterday I finally took some time and read through most of its manual.

I must say that after reading the documentation things do begin to make sense. So I checked out the latest gEDA sources and experimented with Git a bit. Since I wanted to try out how convenient it is to make modifications to your local branch and then submit patches back upstream I started modifying things and in the end I (mostly) fixed one annoyance with gschem.

The problem is that when you have the view zoomed out the schematic quickly gets unreadable. I tried to solve this problem a while ago by porting gschem to Cairo, which provided nice anti-aliased lines and fonts. However that had problems of its own and Cairo support still hasn't been incorporated into gschem source.

Now I took a much simpler approach. It turned out that mayor factor contributing to unreadability is the grid. When zoomed out the features of the schematic get lost in closely spaced grid points. However making grid darker produced the problem that when zoomed in the points were hard to see. So I did a simple modification (made less simple by the awkward handling of colors in the code) that made grid points stand out less from the background when the view is zoomed out.

As you can see from the pictures below, the difference on a zoomed-out view is quite noticeable. It definitely makes gschem usable for editing on one zoom level more than before.

Left patched gschem, right original gschem.

Left patched gschem, right original gschem with grid color changed so that it matches grid color of patched gschem when zoomed out.

You can download the patch from SourceForge.