What's Good About DEHDL Font Support? The Secret's in The SPB16.3 Release!

Well - it's here! Native font support in Allegro Design Entry HDL (DEHDL)!

This has been a often requested feature and is particularly important for our mil-aero customers.

The DEHDL environment has conventionally provided support for vector fonts (6 flavors of basic fonts), where only a single font is supported for displaying all the schematic text objects. However, in real world applications you may require different fonts
to depict and distinguish different text objects in a schematic design.

Additionally, vector fonts in their current form have some drawbacks:

• Schematic designs are unreadable at lower zoom levels with the vector fonts.
• All the different objects in the schematic have one vector font, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the objects.
• Issues were found during the schematic translations from other CAD vendors.

To address these issues, DEHDL now includes support for different fonts.

Font Categories of Text Objects

You can display the following categories of text objects in different fonts:

• Symbol Text
• Symbol / Component / Instance Properties
• RefDes and Section
• Net Name
• Cross References
• Pin Name
• Pin Text
• Pin Properties
• Custom Text
• Text / Notes

You can set fonts and font attributes, such as font name, color, size, style, and effects, for one category of each text objects. Only one set of font attributes can be set for a single category of text objects. You cannot specify different font attributes on individual instances of text objects on the schematic.

For example: If you specify 'Arial' as the font to display net names, all the net names will be displayed in 'Arial'.

Note: When you specify font attributes for a text object, the text object is rendered in the selected font and attributes. However, there is no change in the database.

Setting the Fonts - UI Font Page

You can invoke the Font settings UI from Tools> Options. Select the 'Font' from the left tree section. In the Fonts page of the Design Entry HDL Options dialog box, you can specify font attributes for different types of schematic text objects. To enable support for displaying different fonts, ensure that the Enable Font Support option is selected.

When you construct a new design in SPB16.3 or turn on the font support feature in an existing design, font attributes are set to default values. You can change these values using the dialog box shown above.

Note: The font attribute settings you specify for each category of text object is written in the project .cpm file. These settings are not written to the database. As mentioned earlier, only the Font color and size are stored in the database for a specific instance of a text object.

Setting the Fonts - Project .cpm File Directives

As mentioned above, the selected font attributes for a text object are stored in the project .cpm file. You can bypass the FONT dialog box and directly set the font attributes for each category of text objects in the START_FONTS & END_FONTS section of the .cpm file of the project.

To enable support for fonts using CPM directives, ensure that the CDS_ENABLE_FONTS directive is set to ON in the .cpm file as shown here:

START_FONTS
::
CDS_ENABLE_FONTS 'ON'
::
END_FONTS

To set the values for the five font attributes of any category, set the following .cpm directives:

Where,

Replace <CATEGORY_NAME> with the specified Object.

 
Note: The settings for the fonts can be stored in the project .cpm file, therefore, these settings can also be stored in the site level project .cpm file and the common settings can be used by the whole organization. To mandate a universal font setup for the entire organization, the administrator can lock these settings in the site area and force all the users to follow the same standards. The PCB Librarian tools also provide support for fonts and use the same directives to display symbols. Therefore, the symbol editor canvas of PCB Librarian and the DEHDL canvas have the same look and feel.

Working with Fonts

When you set a value for a specific text object, the values of three font attributes - name, style, and effects, are applied across the design to the existing as well as to the newly created objects. The size and color attributes apply only to the newly added text objects. These changes are not reflected on the existing text objects.

When you plot a design with the font support feature on, the design is printed with the text objects appearing in the same fonts as they appear on the schematic canvas. Similarly, when you publish a PDF of the schematic design using the Allegro Design Publisher (Publish PDF utility), the published document displays the fonts as they appear on the schematic.

Note: If a font support-enabled design is opened on a system where the fonts used in the design are not installed, an error is displayed and the text object is displayed in vector font.
 

Fonts on Different Platforms

The font support feature is fully provided on the Windows platform where all the fonts installed on the system are available to DEHDL.

Cadence provides the following two fonts with the standard installation of Design Entry HDL:

1. Cadence Vector Font, which is the current DEHDL default font
2. Cadence Narrow Font, which is a narrow width font

On UNIX platforms, all fonts installed with MainWin on the system are available to DEHDL.

You can even use custom fonts! Simply copy the font file (typically a .ttf file) to the C:\Windows\Font folder. This will add your custom font automatically on your Windows machine and make it available to all the editors which provide font selection options, including DEHDL.

As always - I'd like to know how you're using this great new feature!             

Jerry "GenPart" Grzenia