How do I use the 24064 fonts in the download section?

BoB-O · Post by **BoB-O** » Fri Apr 16, 2004 8:52 pm

Hello,

So I posted a while back about an emulator. Well, I'm writing one and it's coming along well. However, WinXP doesn't have any good fonts for this. The fonts are getting tiresome, so I wanted to add the real fonts. Unfortunately, the fonts in the download section are a big pile of files instead of the long stream that the dev docs say the 24064 wants. How can I get them in the right format?

Anyone at MO care to share some conversion code?

Thanks,
BoB

Miles · Post by **Miles** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:11 pm

You can contact me at myero@matrixorbital.ca to discuss!!

Dormouse · Post by **Dormouse** » Tue Apr 27, 2004 8:23 pm

Hey guys,

I'm writing an emulator too and am about to run into the same issue. I already wrote some code to read the "folder of BMPs" format so that the emulator would have the right default font, but the next step of course is to write a client program that can send a byte-stream font to a serial port (or named pipe, in the case of my emulator) and emulator code to parse the byte stream. Can you guys cc me on the discussion or something please? If there are any shortcuts or code for doing this that'd be great.

BTW I'm working in C++ on linux, so BoB it sounds like we're on different OSes but maybe there's some opportunity to share work anyway? I dunno, just a thought...

Miles · Post by **Miles** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 11:14 am

There really isn't an easy way to do this. As described in the manual, the byte stream will have to correspond to how we intrepret data. You cannot just convert from a bitmap to a hex file and assume it will work without the proper format.

Dormouse · Post by **Dormouse** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 11:41 am

Cmon Miles did my post really sound like a newbie message asking "hey I just sent the zip file to the LCD display by uploading it using hyperterminal and zmodem and it didn't work, why not"?

Just kidding. Yeah I know there's a conversion required and I can write the code myself but you were so helpful before with the flow control code snippet that I thought I'd give it a shot... just in case you also happened to have some code lying around to encode/decode the font format that the manual describes. But it looks well documented and not that hard, so I'll just code it up myself. No worries, thanks anyway.

Miles · Post by **Miles** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 12:44 pm

Sorry...unfortunately no code laying aroung for that! Can you let me know how you make out? I would be curious on how you would incorporate it!!

Dormouse · Post by **Dormouse** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 12:44 am

Aright, so far so good. I decided to implement it first in python because it's a bit easier, and then convert to C (and anyway I eventually want an implementation in both languages, actually). I can parse a pile of BMPs just fine, but what's an ".mgf" file? Is there a spec for that somewhere? I can see that it contains the name of the font and I'm sure that some of the bytes in there are font metrics, but how about the rest of it? Is there any documentation?

(As always, thanks in advance Miles :-D)

-g.

Miles · Post by **Miles** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 9:14 am

The mgf file sets the outline, as follows:

Byte 0 = number of characters in the font name
bytes = Font name - Max 20 Characters

byte 21 = Height
byte 22 = Width
byte 23 = Start Character
byte 24 = End Character