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MicroPython font handling

This is an attempt to offer a standard method of creating and deploying fonts to MicroPython display drivers.

Introduction

MicroPython platforms generally have limited RAM, but more abundant storage in the form of flash memory. Font files tend to be relatively large. The conventional technique of rendering strings to a device involves loading the entire font into RAM. This is fast but RAM intensive. The alternative of storing the font as a random access file and loading individual characters into RAM on demand is too slow for reasonable performance on most display devices.

This alternative implements a font as a Python source file, with the data being declared as bytes objects. Such a file may be frozen as bytecode. On import very little RAM is used, yet the data may be accessed fast. Note that the use of frozen bytecode is entirely optional: font files may be imported in the normal way if RAM usage is not an issue.

It is intended that the resultant file be usable with two varieties of display devices and drivers. These comprise:

  1. Drivers using bytearray instances as frame buffers, including the official framebuffer class.
  2. Drivers for displays where the frame buffer is implemented in the display device hardware.

The proposed solution

This consists of three components:

  1. font_to_py.py This is a utility intended to be run on a PC and converts a font file to Python source. See below.
  2. The Writer class (writer.py) This facilitates writing text to a device given a suitably designed device driver. See here.
  3. A device driver specification. This includes an example for rendering text to an SSD1306 device with arbitrary fonts. Also described in the above reference.

font_to_py.py

This is a command line utility written in Python 3 to be run on a PC. It takes as input a font file in ttf or otf form together with a height in pixels and outputs a Python source file containing the font data. Fixed and variable pitch rendering are supported. The design has the following aims:

  • Independence of specific display hardware.
  • The path from font file to Python code to be fully open source.

The first is achieved by supplying hardware specific arguments to the utility. These define horizontal or vertical mapping and the bit order for font data.

The second is achieved by using Freetype and the Freetype Python bindings. Its use is documented here. This also details measurements of RAM usage when importing fonts stored as frozen bytecode.

Limitations

Only the ASCII character set from chr(32) to chr(126) is supported. Kerning is not supported. Fonts are one bit per pixel. This does not rule out colour displays: the device driver can add colour information at the rendering stage. It does assume that all pixels of a character are rendered identically.

Converting font files programmatically works best for larger fonts. For small fonts, like the 8*8 default used by the SSD1306 driver, it is best to use binary font files: these are hand designed for rendering at a specific size.

Licence

All code is released under the MIT licence.