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InfiniTimeOrg / InfiniTime

Firmware for Pinetime smartwatch written in C++ and based on FreeRTOS
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Antialiased Fonts for Clock (Digital Watchface) #855

Closed drzacek closed 2 years ago

drzacek commented 2 years ago

Verification

Pitch us your idea!

Pinetime would get a better, cleaner look with smooth fonts

Description

I know antialiased fonts won't work too well on small-res fonts, but I think the huge digits of the clock on digital watchface are big enough for it to work.

Right now we can clearly see the jagged line on the digits and for me, personally - it is repulsive. We can do better.

So maybe someone should do it....

Not me though, I can't :(

kieranc commented 2 years ago

Anti-aliasing is enabled in LVGL but the result is indeed pretty jagged, this is because the fonts are stored at 1bpp - they look a lot smoother if we increase this to 2 or 4bpp but it also takes more space. Since the fonts already take a large portion of our storage, this will probably have to wait until the fonts are moved to the external storage, which shouldn't be too far off now. The open_sans_light font used by pinetimestyle adds about 9kB to the firmware at 1bpp, at 2bpp it's 18kB, 4bpp 36kB...

This is how it looks at 4bpp:

image

It's nice, but 10% of the overall firmware size for one font. Thanks to leo341500 for testing this!

JF002 commented 2 years ago

Indeed, it does look better with anti-aliased fonts but we cannot afford the additional size for the font right now... We might be able to use better/bigger fonts when we'll use the external flash memory to store assets like pictures and fonts.

TheAwesome98-Real commented 1 year ago

the fonts are now on external storage as of infinitime 1.11.0, can this be re-opened?

JF002 commented 1 year ago

I guess it'll depend on the size of these antialiased fonts : loading fonts from external storage take a lot of time, and the fonts must be fully stored in RAM. It's worth testing though.