> On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 22:38 -0700, Scott Dattalo wrote:
> 
> > I'm going to continue to experiment some more to see if there's a 
> > better combination. The proof in the pudding is how it 
> looks on a real 
> > LCD. It'll be a while before I have the hardware.
> 
> http://www.dattalo.com/lcd2.png
> 
> This contains a screen shot of an anti-aliased font for the 
> numbers 0-9.
> (There are bitmaps and other junk on the screen too). This is 
> not the most esthetically pleasing (in my opinion), but I've 
> got most of the tedious part of converting from a generic 
> PC-based font to  4-bit gray scale LCD font. You can compare 
> this font to the 5x7 1-bit font at the bottom. This screen 
> shot is from my simulator.

The anti-aliasing in that gray font is not impressive, but Graphics Gale
doesn't do a better job as can be seen at:
http://www.piclist.com/images/piclist/4bitno.png

The first line is your original, then I added Ariel, Lucinda Console (my
favorite) and Lucinda Sans. Nothing to write home about. 

But then I tried the same three fonts again, with bold set on. That makes a
huge difference, because the pixels have a chance to get all the way on by
the middle of each stroke. I think you can agree that the 4th one down,
Ariel Bold, is very readable.

> In the example, I followed Daniel's suggestion and used gimp 
> to create the graphical image. In this case, I simply used a 
> Courier 10 Pitch font. I exported the image to XPM and wrote 
> a utility to convert from XPM to a PIC include file. I 
> haven't broken the string into a font yet (so it's still one big xpm).

Did you check Nik's character set extractor at
http://www.piclist.com/techref/datafile/charset/extractor/charset_extractor.
htm to see if it could be adapted? It is open source c code so you should be
able to twist it to your will easily if it isn't already capable of
supporting the format you need.

> The next step I'll take is to convert the big XPM into a 
> font. After, that I plan to refine the conversion process so 
> everything is automatic (there are some manual steps I left 
> out in the description above).

I would love to make that available to people as a CGI-BIN service on the
piclist.com server or just as code, if you don't mind allowing me to post
it.

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