Made a slightly nicer font

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The font on er9x isn't quite as readable as it could be.  I modified the font 
in the following ways:

Made each tall letter the 7 pixels tall, and made lower case letters all 5 
pixels tall so the shapes of a and e are much better.  Except for 0 through 9 
and A through F, I made each letter the full 5 pixels wide.  Made the lower 
case letters more readable.  I borrowed on my memory of working with very low 
res fonts back in the old 320x200 VGA days.  The style of letters I used in 
this font was extremely common back then.

If the hex lcd routine were modified so that the 6th pixel space wasn't drawn 
I'd make the A through F letters full width too.  But for now it was easiest 
just to keep them slightly less wide.

On all the screens I find the text much more readable now.  I post it here for 
anyone to use.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by torr...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 5:21

Attachments:

• font_6x1.xbm

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Didn't mean to make this bug report a "defect."  More of a "feature 
enhancement."  Sorry.

Original comment by torr...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 5:21

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I'll look into it.  Thanks!

Original comment by erezra...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 5:41

• Changed state: Accepted
• Added labels: Type-Enhancement
• Removed labels: Type-Defect

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Does look better!
However the letters A..F do look wrong.

Can you try to expand them?

Original comment by erezra...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 5:50

[GoogleCodeExporter]

If I expand A..F then on the screens that use hex displays, the first column 
pixel of each letter is cut off by the space (lcd.cpp line 90 in r267).  The 
only fix is to modify the lcd printing routine to not include this extra space 
when we want to display hex characters.  The only other downside is that the 
hex letter AA would run together since numbers only get 5 pixels on the screen 
unlike letters that get 6.

Does this make sense?  

I thought about adding a mode flag to the lcd_putcAtt() function to let us tell 
it whether we want the space pixel drawn or not, but unfortunately the mode 
parameter is only 8 bits wide and all 8 bits are currently used to signify 
other attributes.  If the mode parameter was set to 16-bits throughout then 
this could be done easily. 

If you think this would work then A..F can easily be expanded.

Original comment by torr...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 6:54

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I'd rather have nicer font throughout and have the hex chars look weird.

The hex procedures are only used for diagnostics.   I'll modify them to print 
characters properly.

Please expand them as well.

Oh, yeah, I'm adding you to the contributors list.  By what name would you like 
to be listed?

Original comment by erezra...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 8:47

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Okay.  You can add "Michael Torrie" as the name.

Attached is the font with A-F widened like the rest of the letters.

Perhaps what we could do is somehow have a flag (a mode bit perhaps) to 
indicate that the letters need to be narrower, and then drop column 2 from the 
letter's bitmap.  That would still look great for A-F.   And it would be better 
than letting the hex letters run together.

Original comment by torr...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 4:47

[GoogleCodeExporter]

oops forgot to attach.  By the way the gimp can natively read and write the 
font_6x1.xbm file, so editing the font is pretty easy.

Original comment by torr...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 4:48

Attachments:

• font_6x1.xbm

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by erezra...@gmail.com on 7 Dec 2010 at 9:55

• Changed state: Fixed