Using anti-aliased fonts

[Carson Dyle]

What do I need to know about using anti-aliased fonts in 3.9 in a custom theme? Are any/all of the fonts included in the 3.9 fonts package anti-aliased?

[[Saint]]

What do I need to know about using anti-aliased fonts in 3.9 in a custom theme?

Absolutely nothing...the syntax is exactly the same.

Are any/all of the fonts included in the 3.9 fonts package anti-aliased?

No, they are not.

For now you must make your own, which really isn't hard at all. It requires checking out the Rockbox source code (the only part you actually need is /rockbox/tools) and compiling the command-line tool convttf.

Alternatively...

I have an anti-aliased font package that I use for my RaaA themes in which the fonts range from 12px to 50px, in 2px increments (12, 14, 16, ... etc.), and has both bold and regular versions of each size. The font used for this package is "DroidSans(-Bold).ttf" from Google.

Link: DroidSans [-Bold].zip



[St.]

[Carson Dyle]

He, thanks for that. I'm looking at them in the 3.9 Fuze v2 simulator under Settings > Theme Settings > Font and all I get is gibberish.

Is there a convttf exe compiled for Windows available for download anywhere?

Post Merge: July 12, 2011, 01:41:26 AMI found a compiled exe of convttf and tried it on a couple of ttf font files from my Windows XP computer. I see the same gibberish in the simulator.

Ideas?

[[Saint]]

Have you actually tried it on the device?
While the simulators do *try* to replicate the physical device, it may well be failing in this regard.

Additionally, are the "gibberish" fonts your conversions, or mine, or both?
I can verify that my fonts do indeed work.

If it is just the fonts you yourself have converted, would you mind posting the syntax that you used to convert them so that I might review it please?


[St.]

[bluebrother]

I found a compiled exe of convttf and tried it on a couple of ttf font files from my Windows XP computer. I see the same gibberish in the simulator.

Ideas?

Broken convttf binary? Where did you get that binary from? I did some fixes some time ago to make it work when compiled natively on Windows (prior to that only Cygwin worked on Windows). There might be broken binaries around (it did compile before, just not produce proper output files).

[Carson Dyle]

Ok, they're working now. Turns out the simulator I was running wasn't v3.9.  

[Carson Dyle]

I have an anti-aliased font package that I use for my RaaA themes in which the fonts range from 12px to 50px, in 2px increments (12, 14, 16, ... etc.), and has both bold and regular versions of each size. The font used for this package is "DroidSans(-Bold).ttf" from Google.

[St.], I got a chance to play with your fonts today. They look great. The smaller ones have a bit too much space between the letters, but the larger ones look perfect. I've downloaded the ttf files for the originals and will try out using convttf.

How much experimenting did you do to get proper line and letter spacing, or are they all the same?

[[Saint]]

It took a *lot* of pissing around to get the fonts to look similar and have consistent ascent, descent, and spacing (and it's still not 100%).

Convttf is a nice tool, but in certain circumstances it will give an undesired output that needs to be tweaked manually.

My suggestion is to use the -vvv (extremely verbose) flag whilst converting so you don't have to load the fonts to the device and attempt to review them there after each change.



[St.]