Sansation Font Conversion .bdf/.fnt files are ugly

[greenman]

I'm very interested in font conversion.
I've found a great font called Sansation that is open-source.
I've seen it used in the beautiful "Clyp-E" theme created by Boris Cisternas.
I like the font, so I downloaded it, and followed all the directions for creating the .fnt files.
I did it on Linux and Windows. In both cases, the resulting files look terrible as compared with the smooth .fnt files provided by Boris.
I tried the otf2bdf/convbdf method. I tried fontforge too.
The fonts look awful.
I tried different resolutions, unselecting rounding, etc.
If someone could give me a clue about how to make these fonts look better, I would be grateful.

[nick_p]

If you've got a dev environment set up, have a go with this patch;

http://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/#/c/412/

I'd be interested how you get on, it made the DejaVuSans font I used it on much smoother.

[greenman]

I have an ubuntu 13.04 Virtual box with a clipzip simulator and a sansa e200 simulator that are working correctly.
convttf.c is not compiled in the tools directory.
Simply executing "make" inside the tools directory did not build convttf, even though it's clearly supposed to in the Makefile.
I found this method on the forum that seemed to do the trick:
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,27390.msg178739.html#msg178739
I added "alias='convttf ~/rockbox/rockbox/tools/convttf' " to my .bashrc and I'm good to go.
Fonts that resulted are anti-aliased and beautiful. Thank you.

[greenman]

If you've got a dev environment set up, have a go with this patch;

http://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/#/c/412/

I'd be interested how you get on, it made the DejaVuSans font I used it on much smoother.

I'm curious - DejaVu has thousands of glyphs. The .fnt files are huge when I create them for that reason. How do you reduce the number of glyphs to a more reasonable commonly-used set?

Code: [Select]

chris@rockbox:~/Downloads/fonts/dejavu/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.34/ttf$ convttf -p 12 -c 1 DejaVuSans.ttf

Please wait, converting DejaVuSans.ttf:
Writing 12-DejaVuSans.fnt00%)
done (converted 5348 glyphs, 0 errors).

chris@rockbox:~/Downloads/fonts/dejavu/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.34/ttf$ ls -lah 12-DejaVuSans.fnt 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chris chris 564K Aug 29 10:23 12-DejaVuSans.fnt
chris@rockbox:~/Downloads/fonts/dejavu/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.34/ttf$

That's just one font!

Edit: I found out that I can modify them on fontsquirrel.com using expert mode with a unicode range 0020-017F to get a subset of common Latin symbols (367 glyphs instead of 5348). The .fnt files are still around 200K though.

[nick_p]

Ha ha, it didn't occur to me, well spotted;

Code: [Select]

$ du -h *
476K    10-DejaVuSans-Bold.fnt
556K    12-DejaVuSans-Bold.fnt
588K    13-DejaVuSans-Bold.fnt
420K    9-DejaVuSans-Bold.fnt
8.0K    DejaVuLicense.txt

[greenman]

I just edited my previous reply, not realizing you would answer so quickly. Thanks!

[nick_p]

Thank you for your thoroughness!

Great hint on cutting down the number of glyphs.

No-one complained about the theme I included them in for the Clip Zip, the combined size is only that of a short mp3 after all.

Maybe the Asian contingent would appreciate the abundance of glyphs...

[greenman]

Maybe the Asian contingent would appreciate the abundance of glyphs...

No doubt.

[[Saint]]

Even though you seem to have figured it out, for what its worth, I'll mention that:

Code: [Select]

make convttf

would've worked fine too.


[Saint]