Phi big fonts available as a library
April 19, 2011 6 Comments
After some initial success, I made some major upgrading, the phi_big_font has rolled out of the “Liudr factory”
Here is how big they look, on a 20X4 screen, showing both regular and inverted fonts.
Details are in the phi_big_font library page.
A video:
This reminds me of the “Large digit” feature on a Matrix Orbital LCD that I own. Their font is larger than yours, as it uses a 4X20 character display to display only 4 characters total. I found a picture of it in action. You might be able to look at this font and get some ideas to improve the readability of your font.
Thanks Bobby. Nice big numbers. Strictly speaking they’re not using dot matrix fonts. They just drew up large numbers, where they can smooth them out at the edges. If they had a font, it would be best to have 5X7 dot matrix fonts, which I have in a POV project I can use. The nice thing of font is you draw up all characters, not just numbers, use dot matrix to represent them all. The not so nice thing is you can’t make those nice edges. I’ll give “super” font a try once I have time. I have a larger 20X4 display too.
Right, their font supports only the 10 digits. Still, they made a good use of different custom characters to smooth the edges of the displayed glyphs. How many custom character slots does your big font use? Maybe you could add some additional custom characters with diagonal edges to improve the readability of your glyphs.
Bobby,
I used all 8 custom characters to turn the space of one character into a column of three rows. Although the blank space and black box are both in the character set, having them defined as character 0 and 7 simplifies the program. I essentially made one character into a 1*3 dot matrix. Using two rows and three columns I get 6*3 dot matrix so I could employ 5*3 dot matrix fonts. With all 4 rows I could do a decent 7*5 dot matrix font but there won’t be any space between characters. Will think about how to make space before I attempt the super fonts.
Hi!
How can I change yor font? I have a 16×2 display and 3 colums per Char too big for me – I want to change width for one char = 2 columns.
In that case the entire library has to be rewritten. I have considered different sizes but my idea was to spend the least time making the library while using most resources so I decided to incorporate a 3X5 matrix font. There are no 2X5 matrix font I know of. You will have to split the character in half to have enough details for a large character and there are not enough custom characters to do just that. If you just want numbers, there are some other libs that only do numbers, but doing them in 2 columns pretty well.