Vermes
Advanced Member level 4
Program Pixel Factory is a complete program in range of creating graphic fonts in the form of files ready to include to the compiler of C language, but also binary fonts can be generated.
As you can see on the picture, only those texts, which are used on LCD screen in microcontroller can be written on the left side. The program generates only graphic images of those fonts to the used characters. It is shown in the red frame. Thanks to that the graphic presentation of such a font takes as small place as possible in the memory of the micocontroller.
In the upper picture you can see that if you want a font in the same form as in typical 7-segments LED displays, you just get such a font to Windows and select it from the list and generate for your own display.
You can freely select different font styles and sizes like below:
In general, the program generates two files for C language. One of them is the file that consists of the font definitions and the second is the header file. First file except the table with hexadecimal values of the image of each font, shows also in ASCII codes using # marks the image of that character.
Then you have a table of descriptors (lookup table) in the file, from which you can read according to ASCII code such features of a character as the width in the pixels and a place in the previous table. At the end of this file there is one structure, where all the information of the font are placed. Thanks to that, you can quickly display them in the program code and they take a little space.
You can also generate a font directly from binary files, which can be placed directly in SD card and the images of fonts can be read from the card. It operates really quickly, although a large font can be read slower than those read from the Flash.
Settings can be improved with the possibility to save a profile and change the parameters so that the program can be used not only for AVR GCC, not only CodeVision, but also for other microcontrollers such as PIC, ARM, etc.
Program was written in Delphi and its original versison can be found in the attachment on the original thread.
Link to original thread (useful attachment) – Pixel Factory - generator fontów graficznych LCD (do C)
