Fonts

[pitosalas]

How are the font .bin files created? I find that the line spacing is not what I would like, for example. Is there a way for me to create one or tweak one? Or are there others you can point me to? Thanks.

[sfe-SparkFro]

I'm guessing @gigapod might know?

[gigapod]

Hi @pitosalas -

Looks like I didn't post how to do this - or any python script on how to build these files. A mistake when I did this 6?! years ago....

This was a port of our Arduino OLED library at the time. Looking into this further, the font.bin files are a compact version the font header files that the Arduino library uses. This is the location of the header of the 8x16 font.

If I look at how the font file is read in our python driver, the format of the file is a binary representation of what the header file includes. Specifically:

• The fine header is 6 bytes in length, each byte maps to the [ width, height, start char, total char, 2 bytes for map width). This is seen here
• The rest of the file is the font data. A binary array. I'm guessing it's just the data from the header file as binary.

From what I can tell, the original font encoding we have came from this Arduino library:
https://github.com/geekammo/MicroView-Arduino-Library

After that repo, I don't see how the font files were built. Maybe something related to X11 bitmaps or some other bit encoding method.

There might be some other 1 bit font encoding schemes out there, but I've long forgot those and nothing comes to mind. The only think I can think of are Hershey Fonts, but the are vector-based and would be too much effort for this system.

That's all I got.
-Kirk

[pitosalas]

Thanks.... Maybe the arduino version of this package has been updated since and I can look there and redo it.

[gigapod]

I actually update/re-wrote the Arduino version after I did the python ports. The original Arduino version was terribly inefficient and slow.

This is the latest and greatest from us:
https://github.com/sparkfun/SparkFun_Qwiic_OLED_Arduino_Library

But the font system is the same as the older version.

But something else might exist out there - end of the day you just need a bitmap of the font so you can set the right pixels in the graphics buffer/device.

-K