I chose the TTX tool because it provides for translation to and from an XML dialect, and XML is easy enough to generate when dealing with constrained data.
ttf file may be quite complex, but there are several ways to make it more accessible to simple scripting. All this power comes at the price of a very complex file format.įortunately, it is possible to ignore most of the advanced features and still get nice looking results when creating fonts which are not intended for typesetting dense running text at small sizes. TrueType is an immensely powerful language for describing font faces, including the detailed shapes that make up each character, an ability to inject code into the font rendering process to improve its appearance at small font sizes, the ability to describe multiple mappings between the characters known to the font and character codes (ASCII, Unicode, ANSI with code pages, etc.) used by applications. Most of those approaches can use a custom font, and TrueType (and its close cousin OpenType) are the most widely usable font format. One the things I do when starting a design for a user interface for a device with limited capabilities is to sketch it out with pencil and paper, with finished documents prepared in Word or Markdown, a general drawing tool such as Inkscape, or for a more complex UI a dedicated wireframing tool such as Balsamiq. This post will be the first of several describing one way to achieve that goal, by creating a utility that will read a variety of textual descriptions of characters and produce a usable TrueType font. One thing that I’d like to see is the ability to import an existing definition of a font from a dump of its character generator ROM, or from source code that created the character images. While it was easy enough to use the editor at FontStruct to create one font, it has some quirks and clumsy points that make it less ideal for my personal workflow. When working with small embedded systems and their displays, these modules aren’t the only low resolution dot based displays we encounter. A previous post discussed my motivation for having a dot matrix font that faithfully reproduced the look and feel of a simple character mode LCD display module.
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