User LayoutEditorFull Wednesday 1st May 2019
I have a layout DB which has a lot of "recognition" texts and they are a bit too small to be legible. Worse, they stay the same displayed size no matter how I zoom in or out (polygons scale, meanwhile). Is there a way to scale the display of texts? What about changing font (to something bigger and clearer)?
Jürgen LayoutEditorFull Wednesday 1st May 2019
Any text element has a width property. Positive values here will result in a text size in databaseunits/userunits and the text will scale with the zoom in and out. A negative value will give the text size in pixel and is scale independent. In case the width is set to zero the default text size is used. This size will also be used for new created text elements and can be set in the setup under setup/shapes/default and/or setup/display/text (for ruler, etc ).
User 20190913 Friday 3rd May 2019
I found that all of the streamed-in texts had no size property and evidently default to zero on streamin. Zero seems to also not-scale. An option to set undeclared text size properties to something other than zero might be a nice feature.
I also notice that text rendering in the layouts is pretty coarse, not "Tru-Type-y". Making text bigger makes it "chunkier" and can be as hard to read. For the foundry I'm using, they use text-layer boxes to recognize devices so the text layer has to be no-fill; texts then appear as collections of hollow boxes arranged as letters.
Jürgen LayoutEditorFull Saturday 4th May 2019
All GDS text elements must have a width (=text size) setting. If the width is set to 0 the setting from *setup::defaultTextWidth* is used. This setting may be ether negative (scale independent) or positive (scales with zoom).
In the setup there is a setting *font interation*. (under display/text) This setting will influence how many iterations are made to display arcs used by a font file. A lower setting will speed up the display, a higher setting make the font smother.
Text that is converted to polygons will be snapped to the nearest point possible with the database units. So if you have a text size of 10nm and a database unit of 1nm the font will be pretty coarseindependent of the font iteration settings.