How to get GLCD fonts

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Software Development
1

A while ago I asked how to get reasonable GLCD fonts. Of course the standard response it to go for "GLCD Creator". This tool can be found with Google. However it did not work to well for me. In addition I was always concerned about the licensing issues of the extracted fonts.

Here come my ideas on how I finally resolved it. Comments are welcome.

  1. Red Hat offers the "liberation fonts". They are free as in "free speech" and (for my purposes) free as in "free beer" as well.
  2. Metafont (from the TeX package) comes with nice fonts as well, but I did not follow this line
  3. I just enter the characters in The Gimp and create a very wide graphics such that all characters are lined up in a single line and spaced well apart.
  4. I use a python script to determine the bounding boxes and then to extract the characters. This script will also generate the .h files that I need.

Bonus of this approach: If I set Gimp to 128x64 and 400% magnification I can try (and edit) the fonts on the Computer screen without any need for specialized font editors.
This approach also works with scanners and allows to extract any fonts from paper (after suitable post processing with the Gimp of course).
Now the only issue remaining is to find a "perfect" font. All fonts so far look not 100% perfect for my taste :slight_smile:

Udo

2

I have the complete Hershey Vector fonts implemented. on the Arduino. I am working on getting them into a library. These are vector fonts and are completely public.

Currently they are included in the drivers for the Liquidware TouchSlide
Check out these screen shots .
http://coewww.rutgers.edu/~msproul/arduino/liquidwaredocs/fonts.html

I hope to have them working in GLCD in the near future.

Mark