On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 13:53 -0700, James Newtons Massmind wrote:

> 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.

I agree that changing the font to bold improves the effective contrast.
Here's another screen shot:

http://www.dattalo.com/lcd3.png

Line 1 is the original (Courier mono 12). Line 2 is the same thing but
bold. Line 3 is Daniel's example. This one looks surprisingly good for
such a small size.

> 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.

This is converting a 2-color png into a bitmap font. This is not what I
want. I wrote a utility for converting from xpm's into a font. This took
only an hour or so. But since Nikolai's office is just around the corner
from mine, maybe I'll ask him tomorrow if I remember. :).


> 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.

When I'm done, there will be a command line utility similar to Nikolai's
bitmap font extractor. This code is being developed as part of a project
I'm doing on the side. It's half hobby and half professional. I don't
charge my client for this kind of stuff, and plan to make it freely
available. In some sense, I see my effort here as going towards promoting
gpsim. You're free to make use of it too. BTW, I have another utility that
extracts images from png's and converts them into PIC include files. This
sounds similar to Nikolai's utility.

Scott
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