I just now saw that the PDF export from xschem does not appear to use "text" - so it's not searchable, which seems like a nice improvement.

that is a nice improvement. I think over time i can do that. Basically xschem creates postscript and i rely on an external tool (configureable in xschemrc, usually ghostscript's ps2pdf tool) to create the pdf. xschem has an internal vector font (quite ugly but pixel precise) that is used also on screen if system does not provide cairo graphics for text. This font is used for ps output. I just need to learn how to place horizontal/vertical text and calculate the correct metric /size in postscript.

Cool! I filed https://github.com/StefanSchippers/xschem/issues/4 for people to see it and chime in if they have thoughts 🙂