Custom Fonts

[teeshq]

Hi how to use custom fonts where i can paste them ect

[martinberlin]

I have the feeling that this part is missing some documentation @lovyan03

I got stuck for example in the latest days trying to render text in Polish, which seems that Adafruit GFX fontconvert tool does not support. As an example:

GADZIE GODY czyli Sagi o czaroksiążcy prapoczątek, opowieść o tym jak młody Debren na praktykę magiczną do wrogiej krainy posłan oko w oko ze smokiem staje i utraconą cześć dziewiczą przywrócić musi - Zarooobki dla dziewic! - przebił się przez uliczny gwar basowy okrzyk. - Gooodziwe zarooobki! Debren potknął się z wrażenia, a potem przyspieszył kroku.

[tobozo]

@martinberlin I know how you feel

The font example sketch should help you with the declarative part.

Here's another example on how to import u8g2 unicode fonts into lgfx.

Contributions to the wiki of this repository are welcome btw.

[martinberlin]

Thanks!
Lovyan also told me is possible to generate Fonts using https://github.com/m5stack/FontCreator so I will try with that as well just to compare the results.
Video of my 9.7" epub reader DIY build using LovyanGFX

[martinberlin]

https://github.com/m5stack/FontCreator -> Discarded for me. Bad documented. Generating all Ubuntu fonts also does not render polish. I don't really see much of a difference with Adafruit GFX font converter.
So far lass test will be with u8g2 and then if nothing works will do it with Open Font Render, that it worked already for me when doing a Chinese weather panel.

[tobozo]

there's still a way to load font files from the filesystem with tft.loadFont( "/path/to/ttf/file", SPIFFS )

found another documentation based on u8g2

• ttf to bdf
• bdf to c

bdfconv settings for polish (found in u8g2 MakeFile):

./bdfconv -f 1 -v -m '32-127,$$104-$$107,$$118-$$119,$$141-$$144,$$15a-$$15b,$$179-$$17c,$$d3,$$f3' ../bdf/unifont.bdf -n unifont_polish -o unifont_polish.c -d ../bdf/7x13.bdf

[martinberlin]

Nice @tobozo thanks a lot. That of storing the ttf in SPIFFS sounds quite useful must say.
Would like to know, the way to use it will be to do something like this?

GFXfont *m_regular_font = tft.loadFont( "/path/to/ttf/file", SPIFFS);

Does it return a GFXfont type or it's something different.
If I could get a complete working example I will try it today. Thanks a lot for the hints!

[tobozo]

sorry it's not TTF but VLW fonts, you can generate those using the Processing software.

There's a tutorial on seeed wiki.

Processing will only see the system fonts though (no file picker), so make sure to install them before launching the interface.

And it's just this, tft.loadFont() has no return value:

tft.loadFont( "/my_VLW_font.vlw", SPIFFS);

I just tried it with AbhayaLibre-Medium-48 on LittleFS and got this result, the font is downscaled at 50% so don't mind the quality loss:

[martinberlin]

Great to see that it works. I will try that then!
Can you please copy the C part where you load the font and then assign it to the display?

I still don't see how to do a: display.setFont(&MyFont);

[tobozo]

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(115200);
  LittleFS.begin();
  Serial.println("ESP32 Ready");
  
  tft.init();

  tft.loadFont("/AbhayaLibre-Medium-48.vlw", LittleFS);

  tft.setTextSize(0.5);

  tft.println();

  tft.println("    ąćęłńóśźż    ");
  tft.println("    ĄĆĘŁŃÓŚŹŻ    ");

  tft.setTextSize(1);
}

[martinberlin]

That looks like a great solution. The problem for the ePub project is that when rendering HTML you need sometimes to switch from one Regular to Bold or similar, and I think doing it this way it will have kind of a great overhead.
But if you use it as default font for everything I guess this is the way to go!
I will give it a try also to U82G. And then also maybe tweaking fontconvert (Adafruit GFX which stops at 0x7E 126

) to support 8-bit font Glyphs (Why they limited this to 7-bit?) or to also tweak https://github.com/vroland/epdiy/blob/master/scripts/fontconvert.py to also generate GLXFont format since it already supports 8-bit definitions.

[martinberlin]

Regarding this @tobozo

   tft.loadFont("/AbhayaLibre-Medium-48.vlw", LittleFS);

I don't think this is an option when using IDF. Because I checked the code and over those functions there is always an:

 #ifdef ARDUINO

Which won't compile that part for me. I think there is another one available that is:

 void loadFont(const char *path)

But it won't work as is with a path, unless I have a way to tell it that it's SPIFFS. Or I should find a way to preload each of this fonts in SPIFFs, which does not seem an option. At the end I've loosed a lot of time with this that could be used to implement Open Font Render, which works and it seems like a more straight-forward option. But thanks a lot to make me discover this new functions!

[martinberlin]

Got it working using latest fontconvert from Adafruit

Example on how to do it:

 /fontconvert /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu/Ubuntu-R.ttf 12 32 350 > Ubuntu_R12pt8b.h

Note: It seems the polish glyphs are in the area that is from 255 -> 350 (Later will open the font with FontForge and check more specifically)

[lefty01]

Hi, may I jump in on this, I need some font with german umlaut. I figured I might be able to use /usr/share/fonts/liberation-mono/LiberationMono-Regular.ttf for example, convert with:
$ ./fontconvert /usr/share/fonts/liberation-mono/LiberationMono-Regular.ttf 12 32 350 > LiberationMono-Regular.h

but still note sure how can I use / load the font.
could u please post the snippet where you use the include file and call setFont? thx.

[lefty01]

ah ... ok it's just like that, include the header (output from fontconvert) and use setFont.
run (check here for example for number of last char to include https://symbl.cc/en/unicode/table/)
$ ./fontconvert LiberationMono-Regular.ttf 18 32 382 > LiberationMono-Regular_18.h
in code:

#include "LiberationMono-Regular_18.h"
...
  lcd.setFont(&LiberationMono_Regular18pt8b);
  lcd.println("Hellö Wüorlß");
  lcd.println("123 €");

[martinberlin]

Thanks a lot @tobozo
Polish font render preview plus idea I got from seeing Bodmer update in Open Font Render