Large fonts

inmarket
Posts: 89
Joined: Fri Jul 27, 2012 1:37 pm
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: Large fonts

Postby inmarket » Tue Apr 02, 2013 2:35 am

Whilst people are very interested in creating a scalable font solution (and yes it would take a lot of work), there are really only two solutions...

1/ Use an existing library and patch it to run on GFX. Based on the library code that I have seen in the past this is not a feasible solution for most platforms due to RAM requirements. Whilst it may work on some of the larger processors, it will not work without extensive re-work on the majority of the embedded platforms being targeted. Still, it would be nice as an option.
2/ We roll our own scalable font solution keeping RAM usage to a minimum. I nice idea but a HUGE amount of work. There are also all the tools that are needed to make conversions from existing font formats possible.

Whilst scalable fonts is a great idea - nothing comes without cost... in our case RAM, programming time and drawing speed. Thus bitmap fonts will always form a major part of the solution and will probably remain as the main font renderer for the foreseeable future. It works with extremely little overhead and is VERY fast.

I looked at the option of removing the 16/32 bit limit on the height of bitmap characters. This is not easy as by definition a bitmap font describes all the bits in a "box". It presents both drawing problems and storage problems. Again RAM usage is a concern. My thoughts currently is that this would be a waste of time and energy given that the coming bitmap support should enable programmers to create the equivalent of really large fonts using bitmaps.

What is needed first is some easy way to add new fonts (and possibly to scale the bitmap fonts a bit more intelligently - at least for filled backgrounds).

I started writing a tool to convert X-Windows BDM fonts (a bitmap format from X-Windows past) to GFX format. There are lots of good BDM fonts available. I got waylaid by other priorities and the desire for the tool to compile/run on both Win32 and Unix. Perhaps someone would like to complete this task before we look at implementing scalable fonts (which only a few people will be able to use anyway).

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DeusExMachina
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Re: Large fonts

Postby DeusExMachina » Tue Apr 02, 2013 3:51 am

thank you all for advance... I still don't have devboard with LCD screen
board
http://www.starterkit.ru/html/index.php ... view&id=68
screen
http://www.starterkit.ru/html/index.php ... view&id=36

When I receive this kit, I'll try to use it with large fonts and cyrillic script


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