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1. font_to_py.py

This PC utility converts an industry standard font file to Python source code.

Python font files offer advantages on microcontroller platforms running MicroPython. They provide a much faster way to render glyphs than the principal alternative which is a random access binary file on the filesystem.

The format of the Python font file is designed to save large amounts of RAM on resource-limited targets: the font file may be incorporated into a firmware build such that it occupies flash memory rather than scarce RAM. Python code built into firmware is known as frozen bytecode.

1.1 Revision history

22 Mar 2024 V0.42 Default mapping is now horizontal.
30 Jan 2023 V0.41 With thanks to @ferrolive (Igor Oliveira) who supplied the charset file.

  1. Charset file enables Chinese, Japanese and Korean glyphs to be specified.
  2. Now allows much larger output files: sparse index is now 24 bit.

1 Feb 2021 V0.4 With thanks to @enigmaniac for the suggestion and code ideas.

  1. Now supports bdf and pcf font files for better results at small sizes.

17 Oct 2019 V0.33 With thanks to Stephen Irons (@ironss).

  1. Fix bug where input rather than output filename was checked.
  2. Add baseline() to ouput file returning the maximum ascent.
  3. Correct left position of rendered glyph.

21 Sept 2019 V0.22

  1. Reduced output file size for sparse fonts. These result from large gaps between ordinal values of Unicode characters not in the standard ASCII set.
  2. Output file has comment showing creation command line.
  3. Repo includes the file extended. Using -k extended creates fonts comprising the printable ASCII set plus °μπωϕθαβγδλΩ£. Such a font has 96 chars having ordinal values from 32-981.
  4. Improvements to font_test.py.
  5. Code emitted for sparse fonts now uses non-recursive search algorithm.

Python files produced are interchangeable with those from prior versions: the API is unchanged.

Main README

2. Dependencies

The utility requires Python 3.2 or greater, also freetype which may be installed using pip3. On Linux (you may need a root prompt):

# apt-get install python3-pip
# pip install freetype-py

3. Usage

font_to_py.py is a command line utility written in Python 3. It is run on a PC. It takes as input a font file with a ttf or otf extension and a required height in pixels and outputs a Python 3 source file. Alternatively it will accept a bdf or pcf source file (which includes a height definition). The pixel layout is determined by command arguments. By default fonts are stored in variable pitch form. This may be overidden by a command line argument.

By default the printable ASCII character set (ordinal values 32 to 126 inclusive) is supported (i.e. not including control characters). Command line arguments can modify this range as required to specify arbitrary sets of Unicode characters. Non-English and non-contiguous character sets may be defined.

Further arguments ensure that the byte contents and layout are correct for the target display hardware. Their usage should be specified in the documentation for the device driver.

Examples of usage to produce Python fonts with a height of 23 pixels:

$ font_to_py.py FreeSans.ttf 23 myfont.py
$ font_to_py.py -k extended FreeSans.ttf 23 my_extended_font.py

3.1 Arguments

3.1.1 Mandatory positional arguments:

  1. Font file path. Must be a ttf or otf file.
  2. Height in pixels. In the case of bdf or pcf files a height of 0 should be specified as the height is retrieved from the file.
  3. Output file path. Filename must have a .py extension (unless writing a binary font). A warning is output if the output filename does not have a .py extension as the creation of a binary font file may not be intended.

3.1.2 Optional arguments:

  • -f or --fixed If specified, all characters will have the same width. By default fonts are assumed to be variable pitch.
  • -x or --xmap Specifies that the output file should be horizontally mapped. This is the default if no mapping is specified. Most display hardware requires horizontal mapping.
  • -y or --ymap Vertical mapping for specialist display hardware. Not compatible with Writer classes.
  • -r or --reverse Specifies bit reversal in each font byte.
  • -s or --smallest Ordinal value of smallest character to be stored. Default 32 (ASCII space).
  • -l or --largest Ordinal value of largest character to be stored. Default 126.
  • -e or --errchar Ordinal value of character to be rendered if an attempt is made to display an out-of-range character. Default 63 (ord("?")).
  • -i or --iterate Specialist use. See below.
  • -b or --binary Create a binary font file. See below.
  • -c or --charset Option to restrict the characters in the font to a specific set. See below.
  • -k or --charset_file Obtain the character set from a file. Typical use is for alternative character sets such as Cyrillic: the file must contain the character set to be included. An example file is cyrillic. Another is extended which adds unicode characters °μπωϕθαβγδλΩ to those in the original ASCII set of printable characters. At risk of stating the obvious this will only produce useful results if the source font file includes all specified glyphs.

The -c option may be used to reduce the size of the font file by limiting the character set. If the font file is frozen as bytecode this will not reduce RAM usage but it will conserve flash. Example usage for a digital clock font:

$ font_to_py.py Arial.ttf 20 arial_clock.py -c 1234567890:

Example usage with the -k option:

font_to_py.py FreeSans.ttf 20 freesans_cyr_20.py -k cyrillic
font_to_py.py -x -k extended FreeSans.ttf 17 font10.py

If a character set is specified via -c or -k, then --smallest and --largest should not be specified: these values are computed from the character set.

Any requirement for arguments -xr will be specified in the device driver documentation. Bit reversal is required by some display hardware.

Using the -f argument with a variable pitch source font will produce a fixed pitch result. A better appearance would be achieved by using a font designed as monospaced.

There have been reports that producing fonts with Unicode characters outside the ASCII set from ttf files is unreliable. If expected results are not achieved, use an otf font. I have successfully created Cyrillic and extended fonts from a ttf, so I suspect the issue may be source fonts lacking the required glyphs.

3.1.3 The -i or --iterate arg

This is for specialist applications; it causes a generator function glyphs to be included in the Python font file. A generator instantiated with this will yield bitmap, height, and width for every glyph in the font.

3.1.4 The height arg

In the case of scalable ttf or otf source files the specified height is a target. The algorithm gets as close to the target height as possible (usually within one pixel). The actual height achieved is displayed on completion, along with the width of the widest character.

If a bdf or pcf bitmapped font is specified, the height arg should be 0. A nonzero value will cause a warning message to be printed and the value will be ignored.

3.2 The font file

Assume that the you have employed the utility to create a file myfont.py. In your code you will issue:

import myfont

The myfont module name will then be used to instantiate a Writer object to render strings on demand. A practical example may be studied here. The detailed layout of the Python file may be seen here.

4. Python font files

Users of the Writer or CWriter classes or of nano-gui do not need to study the file format. These details are provided for those wishing to access Python font files directly.

Files start with a comment which is the command line used to create the font.

They include the following functions:

  1. height() Height of bitmaps in pixels (all are the same height).
  2. max_width() Width of widest glyph in pixels.
  3. baseline() Offset from top of the bitmap to the baseline. This is a notional "ruler line" where glyphs are drawn. Enables rendering different fonts on a common baseline. It is a positive number of pixels.
  4. hmap() True if bitmaps are horizonataly mapped.
  5. reverse() True if bit reversal is used.
  6. monospaced() True if bitmaps were created with fixed pitch.
  7. min_ch() Returns smallest ordinal value in font.
  8. max_ch() Largest ordinal value in font.
  9. get_ch() Arg: a Unicode character. Returns three items:
    A memoryview into the bitmap for that character.
    Bitmap height in pixels. Equal to height() above.
    Bitmap width in pixels.

See this link for an explanation of baseline.

5. Binary font files

There is an option to create a binary font file, specified with a -b or --binary command line argument. In this instance the output filename must not have a .py extension. This format was developed for an e-paper driver where the file was stored on the display's internal flash memory; it is not clear if there is a current use case.

Binary files currently support only the standard ASCII character set. There is no error character: the device driver must ensure that seeks are within range. Conversion of bdf and pcf font files is currently unsupported.

Only the following optional arguments are valid:

  • -f or --fixed.
  • -x or --xmap.
  • -y or --ymap
  • -r or --reverse.

The format of binary font files is described here.

An alternative implementation of binary fonts may be found in this repo. It provides for rotated rendering to a FrameBuffer.

6. Dependencies, links and licence

The code is released under the MIT licence. The font_to_py.py utility requires Python 3.2 or later.

The module relies on Freetype which is included in most Linux distributions.
It uses the Freetype Python bindings which will need to be installed.
My solution draws on the excellent example code written by Daniel Bader. This may be viewed here and here.

Appendix 1: RAM utilisation Test Results

The supplied freesans20.py and courier20.py files were frozen as bytecode on a Pyboard V1.0. The following code was pasted at the REPL:

import gc, micropython
gc.collect()
micropython.mem_info()

import freesans20

gc.collect()
micropython.mem_info()

import courier20

gc.collect()
micropython.mem_info()

def foo():
    addr, height, width = freesans20.get_ch('a')

foo()

gc.collect()
micropython.mem_info()
print(len(freesans20._font) + len(freesans20._index))

The memory used was 1712, 2032, 2384 and 2416 bytes. As increments over the prior state this corresponds to 320, 352 and 32 bytes. The print statement shows the RAM which would be consumed by the data arrays if they were not frozen: this was 3956 bytes for freesans20.

The foo() function emulates the behaviour of a device driver in rendering a character to a display. The local variables constitute memory which is reclaimed on exit from the function. Its additional RAM use was 16 bytes.

Similar figures were found in recent (2019) testing on a Pyboard D.

Conclusion

With a font of height 20 pixels RAM saving was an order of magnitude. The saving will be greater if larger fonts are used as RAM usage is independent of the array sizes.

Appendix 2: Recent improvements

The representation of non-contiguous character sets such as the extended set presents a challenge because the ordinal values of the Unicode characters can be expected to span a range much greater than the number of characters in the set. Using an index of the type used for the ASCII set would be inefficient as most of the elements would be null (pointing to the default character).

The code now behaves as follows. If the character set contains no more than 95 characters (including the default) the emitted Python file is as before. This keeps the code small and efficient for the common (default) case.

Larger character sets are assumed to be sparse and the emitted code uses an index optimised for sparse values and a binary search algorithm.

Appendix 3: font_test.py

This enables a Python font file to be described and rendered at the command prompt. It provides a useful way of checking unknown font files. Compatibility with files created by old versions of font_to_py is not guaranteed.

It runs under Python 3.2 or above. Given a font myfont.py the following will render the supplied string (assuming that font_test.py has executable privilege):

./font_test myfont Hello

Omitting arguments (or supplying --help) will provide usage information.

If no string is provided a default will be printed. This is designed to test fonts created with -k extended. Other fonts will show ? characters for missing glyphs.

Sample output:

$ ./font_test.py freesans1 Hello
Vertical map
Normal bit order
Proportional spacing
Dimensions height*max_width 23 * 23
Start char " " (ord 32) end char "~" (ord 126)
...................................................
##.........##................##...##...............
##.........##................##...##...............
##.........##................##...##...............
##.........##................##...##...............
##.........##................##...##...............
##.........##.......#####....##...##......#####....
##.........##......#######...##...##.....#######...
#############.....###....##..##...##....###...###..
#############....###......##.##...##...###.....###.
##.........##....##.......##.##...##...##.......##.
##.........##....###########.##...##...##.......##.
##.........##....###########.##...##...##.......##.
##.........##....##..........##...##...##.......##.
##.........##....##.......##.##...##...###.....###.
##.........##.....##.....##..##...##....###...###..
##.........##......########..##...##.....#######...
##.........##.......#####....##...##......#####....
...................................................
...................................................
...................................................
...................................................
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