TeensieFont

A tiny font library intended for use on Arduino and other similar platforms

Capabilities

• A memory footprint of roughly 200-300 bytes if the font is loaded in flash
• Pseudo font antialiasing without changing the font [Soon]
• No specific display requirements
• Font transparency and colour can be implemented by the user with a custom driver
• Online script to create your own font from a ttf file [Soon]

Examples

Inter font (105 characters)

24pt [2776 Bytes]
10pt [1226 Bytes] {Needs slight optimisations}
5pt [388 Bytes] {Really too small to read!}

Example at 24pt font without antialiasing [Simulator screenshot]

^{(24pt is roughly 17x18px)}

Note

The "libray" isn't a library yet but it shouldn't be too difficult to use it in your own project. Its part of a larger project to make a full graphics library similar to LVGL.
Likewise it isn't a full Arduino project yet, since i'm testing it on my laptop, I have written it to be C++ compliant and am running my code alongside a Java simulator that emulates the parallel LCD im using. Use attributes like PROGMEM on font definitions for utilising SPI Flash.
The above "issues" will be fixed when I finish most of my library and migrate over to hardware as in this arrangement im able to develop faster.

Limitations

• Above around 60pt font, the bit packing algorithm isn't as efficient (due to a fixed "segment" size of 4 bits per colour change)
• The library is not designed to be super fast, I just wanted support for more fonts in less memory
• Fonts files are black and white (no grayscale), colour is implemented by "chromakey"
• No current way [But really simple to do] to free up memory after loading a font
• Missing optimisations regarding font loading and unpacking

Usage

Import headers

#include "teeniefont.h"
#include "fonts.h"

Configure the font

setFont(FONT_INTER_24);
setBackground(WHITE);
setForeground(BLACK);
enableAA(false);
configurePixelWriter(myPixelWriter);

Implement the simple driver method that takes an XY Co-ordinate and a colour and puts it on the screen.

void myPixelWriter(int x, int y, int col) {
    writePixel(x,y,col);
}

Utilise the draw text function

drawText("Hello World!",0,0);

Note:

Colour is a 32 bit unsigned integer. Its 3 colour channels (8bit) with an 8bit alpha channel. If you don't have a framebuffer or a way of reading the current colour of a pixel at a co-ordinate to properly implement transparency, the alpha (transparancy) channel should be treated as a 0-255 percentage of foreground to background colour to lerp.
Colour is encoded as: 0xAARRGGBB
Black is 0xFF000000, White is 0xFFFFFFFF (You can #DEFINE these)