Meadow Font Test

Add new fonts to Meadow MicroGraphics Library

Here we demonstrate adding new fonts to the Meadow MicroGraphics Library

1. Consolas
2. IBM Plex Mono
3. Sometype Mono
4. BP Typewrite
5. IBM 3270
6. 52 Adafruit GFX fonts
7. Microsoft .NetMF fixed fonts
8. Petscii - character ROM dump
9. Release the Hoard! - 37 Fixed width Yaff fonts from the Bitmap Hoard
10. Font Hoard part II - 11 more wider fixed width fonts, custom Yaff Font Renderer
11. Font Hoard part III - 39 Proportional Yaff fonts, mostly Mac and Lisa from the Bitmap Hoard

The Meadow.Foundation MicroGraphics Library supports drawing fonts in a few (now 8) fixed width sizes.

4x6	4x8	6x8
8x8	8x12	8x16
12x16	12x20

The smaller sizes may be appropriate for hand drawn fonts, but if we are converting higher quality desktop fonts, 12x20 is the only size that can support fonts with descenders. These initial attempts target fixed width or Monospaced fonts.

Consolas

Consolas is a Microsoft font, used in visual studio, it may not be appropriate for open source use.

Although apparently Fonts are not Copyright protected

So I found 3 open source fonts, which ended up with a much smaller character set

Note Consolas has an Initialization fault in RC1 and RC2

IBM Plex Mono

IBM Plex Mono or on Github

Sometype Mono

monospacedfont or on Github

BP Typewrite

BP Typewrite may be the most distinct of these fonts. It is based on an italic font stood upwrite. Smaller set of characters.

IBM 3270

A favourite for terminal fonts or code editing. This version comes from an OpenType font converted back to bitmap 12x20. It has many of the drawing symbols of the petscii font - at a larger size, and at less precision. This font has many unicode characters hence the double size screenshot.

from github

To use them in your meadow project, you just need to compile the font file into your application. Then

graphics.CurrentFont = new BPtypewrite12x20();

The Windows application to generate these font files is called FontConverter

GFX Fonts

from Adafruit. These are bitmap fonts, that are proportionatley spaced, and support text wrapping. I had to convert the C++ .h files into C#. There seems to be 3 font faces converted from Berkley Unix.

1. Free Mono
2. Free Sans
3. Free Serif

Each font has four typefaces: Normal, Bold, Oblique (or Italic), and Bold Oblique (or Bold Italic) and appears in four sizes: 9pt, 12pt, 18pt, 24pt.

Free Mono

Normal	Bold	Oblique	Bold Oblique

Free Sans

Normal	Bold	Oblique	Bold Oblique

Free Serif

Normal	Bold	Italic	Bold Italic

There are also 4 additional extra small fonts, in one typeface each. Other than the TomThumb font, only the lower 7bit ascii characters are available. I have included a 4 times zoom of each of the small fonts so you can see the detail (or lack thereof).

Org_01

Picopixel

Tiny3x3

Tom Thumb

To use GFX fonts in your Meadow project, you need to include the GFXFontBase.cs and the GraphicsLibraryEx.cs as well as any of the GFX fonts you want to use. DrawGFXText is used to display text. The x,y origin is for the left baseline of the character (not the upper left). The WrapText property can be enabled and text will be written on the next line if it doesn't fit on the current line.

More GFX font info: Here and Here

There are certainly other GFX fonts avaialble, including tools to convert to the GFX format. Adafruit says they will not expand the base fonts available on Github any further.

Microsoft .NetMF fixed fonts

I found these in the abandoned .net Micro Framework repository. They include a few extended characters. The way the character bitmaps are laid out is much easier to hand edit if you want to.

Converted from C++ these are compatible with the Meadow Graphics Library Fonts (just include the font file).

8x8

8x15

Petscii 8x8

The OG personal computer circa 1977 was the Commodore PET - 6502 processor, cassette deck, green text enclosed in an industrial steel case. This version of the ROM is from the SuperPet a weird work from home offshoot that had Pascal, Fortran and APL built in along with the MSBasic. So along with the famous line drawing characters, we also get some APL symbols and several other rare math symbols. The character set is mapped to unicode (rather than the original shiftable 7bit ascii). See the comments for which unicode character to use.

from 6502.org

Petscii8x8

and don't forget, the Meadow Graphics Library can also display fonts at 2X or 3X here is petscii at 2X (16x16)

The Bitmap Hoard

Part 1 - Fixed width 12px or less

Rob Hagemans has not only collected many historical bitmap fonts, he has also created a new storage format (Yaff) that is more human readable than most formats, and not too bad to parse.

These Fonts, are read by the YaffReader, which returns an IYaffFont which is an IFont that the Micrographics DrawText function can use. This means you can include the YaYaffReader.cs in your meadow application, along with any number of these Yaff files, and load and display the font at runtime. This consumes more memory than compiling the fonts, but being able to treat the fonts as files, instead of code is more convienient.

Amiga

Topaz
Xen
Nudel
MagicWB XCourier
Courier

Apple Mac

Gacha and Monaco are two of the few fixed Mac Fonts. There are a few slightly smaller versions of both.

Gacha 7x13	Monaco 7x16

Atari

Classic	ST 6x6	ST 8x8	ST 8x16

Gem

There are several other sizes for these fonts in the hoard

DrDos 8x19	Gem 3.1 6x6	Viewmax 8x8

Hellschreiber

Feld-Hell Typenbildschreiber 7x14	Hellschreiber T-Typ 72 GL 7x14	Hell-80 7x9	GTL Telewriter 7x8
Abtastfernschreiber 8x14

DEC VT-xxx Terminals

VT-52	VT-100	VT-220
funky g and lightning tilda	Desenders and line drawing characters	Accented characters, backward ?

Olivetti

There are other regional versions with slightly different characters as well

Windows 3.1 Terminal

Like the Mac fonts, most are proportional. There are also older versions from Windows 1.0-3.0

Terminal 140	Terminal 8514

Part 2 - Wider fixed width fonts, and a custom Yaff Renderer

The Yaff renderer was designed for proportional fonts, as it takes a vertical slice of the character, and wider characters just have more slices. This is also true of fixed width fonts, and removes any limitations, or alignment requirements.

The YaffReader is used to read the yaff files, and the MicroGraphicsEx extension has a DrawYaffText method similar to DrawGFXText and the default DrawText in the base library. DrawYaffText can wrap text automatically, again similar to the DrawGFXText method.

Amiga

Courier 24 15x23

Atari

ST 16x32

Geos

Lots of fonts of various sizes in this set too

LW Barrows 14x24

OS/2

Lots of OS/2 fonts available in various sizes and versions

Courier 15x25

DEC VT-320

The Graphics Terminal had a larger 15x12 font and character set plus the abilty to add custom fonts

VT-320

VT-320 Fonts from Paul Williams

Boothill	Future	Gothic
Jetpac	Mercy	Powerslave

Part 3 - Proportional Yaff Fonts - mostly Mac and Lisa

Mac

Athens	Chicago	Geneva	London	Los Angeles
Monaco Prop	Monaco Fixed	New York 24	New York 36	San Franciso
Toronto	Venice	Cairo	Mobil	System
Courier	Cream	eWorld	Helvetica
Symbol 12	Symbol 18	Palatino 14	Palatino 18
Espy Sans	Espy Bold 12	Espy Bold 14	Espy Serif

Lisa

Classic 12	classic 18	Classic 24
Modern 14	Modern 24	System Patterns	System Text
Toolkit	Window Manager

Others

BSD Banner	Epson FX Printer	Windows EGA System