Re: [EE] Software to create a font from a bitmap

On Mon, May 4, 2026 7:52 am, Isaac Marino Bavaresco wrote:
> Dear All,
>
>
> I just=C2=A0published on GitHub a program that I use to create fonts for =
my
> embedded equipments, together with some code to use those fonts in a
> microcontroller.
>
> The URL is: <https://github.com/Ibavaresco/EmbeddedFonts/tree/main>
>
>
> As most know, graphical color displays usually don't know how to draw
> text, all that they know are pixels. Creating text on the screen is
> responsibility of the firmware running on the MCU.
>
> Usually designers provide only a single fixed-width font, because that
> is a laborious part of the development.
>
> Years ago I designed a new equipment with a TFT LCD based on the HX8357
> controller. That LCD offered a good resolution (320x240) with 16-bit
> colors, and I wanted to create a nice U.I., so I created routines to deal
> with variable-width characters and needed a good way to create the font
> bitmaps.
>
> This program takes a monochromatic Windows bitmap file with a very
> particular text content/layout, extracts all the character shapes (code
> page WINDOWS-1252 a.k.a. "ANSI") and create a C source file with the data
> to be used by my LCD routines.
>
> The software can provide the "seed" text file that is to be converted
> into a bitmap to be extracted.
>
> This software makes easy to use several different fonts, with different
> typefaces, sizes and effects. It all depends on the=C2=A0available
> program=C2=A0memory, of course.


Very nice! I've been using Unifont for at least 15 years. It does 8x16 and
16x16 glyphs. If I am only using ASCII, it fits inside the microcontroller
flash (typically PIC32). If using 16 bit character encoding (using UTF-8),
I put it in an external 1 MB flash. The PIC code then indexes into the
external flash, reads the bitmap, and sends it to the display.

I did a little bit of study of font files for vertical text. Font files
are complicated! I never did figure out how to find the vertical origin
and the advance height for vertical text...

Harold
https://w6iwi.org




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