enable custom fonts in polygon text

[tvt173]

it would be nice if the user could easily load a custom font to use for polygon text.

currently the text() function references private variables for character glyphs, widths, and indents. it would be nice if it was easier to do this, maybe from a library of gds characters.

relevant to
heitzmann/gdspy/issues/207

[joamatab]

@spauka worked on this for phidl

[spauka]

Hi @tvt173,

The implementation for PHIDL is here https://github.com/amccaugh/phidl/blob/master/phidl/font.py (Docs here: https://phidl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/geometry_reference.html#Text)

Font reading is performed using freetype-py, and once this is done you would need a curve implementation that supports cubic or quadratic bezier curves.

It would be reasonable straightforward to port to use GDSPY polygons/curves (which do support the right curves) rather than PHIDLs Device, although it's not something I would likely have the time to do, but let me know if I could help at all.

[tvt173]

very cool, @spauka ! thanks for sharing. will re-share this on the original gdspy ticket

[joamatab]

#743

See docs here
https://gdsfactory.github.io/gdsfactory/components.html#text-freetype