Font Editor

From MCS Wiki AVR
Jump to: navigation, search

In version 2079 the Font Editor plugin is replaced by the integrated Font Editor from the Tools menu. It has the same options.


The Font Editor is a Plug in that is intended to create Fonts that can be used with Graphical display such as SED1521, KS108, color displays, etc.

 

When you have installed the Font Editor , a menu option becomes available under the Tools menu : Font Editor.

 

When you choose this option the following window will appear:

 

font_editor

 

 

You can open an existing Font file, or Save a modified file.

 

The supplied font files are installed in the Samples directory.

You can copy an image from the clipboard, and you can then move the image up , down, left and right.

 

When you select a new character, the current character is saved. The suggest button will draw an image of the current selected character.

 

When you keep the left mouse button pressed, you can set the pixels in the grid. When you keep the right mouse button pressed, you can clear the pixels in the grid.

 

When you choose the option to create a new Font, you must provide the name of the font, the height of the font in pixels and the width of the font in pixels.

 

The Max ASCII is the last ASCII character value you want to use. Each character will occupy space. So it is important that you do not choose a value that is too high and will not be used.

 

When you display normal text, the maximum number is 127 so it does not make sense to specify a value of 255.

 

A font file is a plain text file.

Lets have a look at the first few lines of the 8x8 font:

 

Font8x8:

$asm

.db 1,8,8,0

.db 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 ;

.db 0,0,6,95,6,0,0,0 ; !

 

 

The first line contains the name of the font. With the SETFONT statement you can select the font. Essential, this sets a data pointer to the location of the font data.

 

The second line ($ASM) is a directive for the internal assembler that asm code will follow.

All other lines are data lines.

 

The third line contains 4 bytes: 1 (height in bytes of the font) , 8 (width in pixels of the font), 8 (block size of the font) and a 0 which was not used before the 'truetype' support, but used for aligning the data in memory. This because AVR object code is a word long.

 

This last position is 0 by default. Except for 'TrueType' fonts. In BASCOM a TrueType font is a font where every character can have it's own width. The letter 'i' for example takes less space then the letter 'w'. The EADOG128 library demonstrates the TrueType option.

In order to display TT, the code need to determine the space at the left and right of the character. This space is then skipped and a fixed space is used between the characters. You can replace the 0 by the width you want to use. The value 2 seems a good one for small fonts.

 

All other lines are bytes that represent the character.

 

 



Languages   English Deutsch  
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
Navigation
In other languages
Language