saur0n / fontem

Font decoder for embedding into C, for embedded systems

C Font Embedder

Overview

A simple C program to turn selected characters from a TrueType font file into a .c/.h file pair such that the type can be embedded into the binary of a program. This is particularly useful for Embedded systems that may not have a file storage device.

Command line parameters

    Usage: fontem [OPTION...]
      -f, --font=file        Font filename (default: null)
      -s, --size=integer     Font size (default: 10)
      -c, --chars=string     List of characters to produce (default: "!@#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]\:";'<>?,./`~ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789")
      -n, --name=file        Output name (without extension) (default: null)
      -d, --dir=dir          Output directory (default: ".")

    Help options:
      -?, --help             Show this help message
          --usage            Display brief usage message

Example usage

   mkdir -p fonts

   ./fontem --font=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu-font-family/UbuntuMono-B.ttf \
            --size=10 --name=ubuntumono --dir=fonts

This will generate two files, fonts/font-ubuntumono-10.c and fonts/font-ubuntumono-10.h.

To use them, you will need to copy src/resource/fontem.h to the fonts directory. Examples of these files may be found in the examples directory of this repository.

The .c file contains descriptions of each character (glyph) that was translated. At the end there is a lookup table mapping the glyphs to their ASCII code. (Note that this table is indexed on the ordinal value of each character; if you include high-valued UNICODE characters then this will make for a large empty table; this shortcoming will be addressed in a future revision.)

Dependencies

Along side GCC and GNU Autotools, this project depends on the libpopt and libfreetype libraries.

On Ubuntu the build dependencies can be installed with:

   sudo apt install build-essential automake autoconf libtool \
                    libpopt-dev libfreetype6-dev

And the runtime dependencies, if you need to move the program to another host, can be installed with:

   sudo apt install libpopt0 libfreetype6

License

This file is distributed under the terms of the MIT License. See the LICENSE file at the top of this tree, or if it is missing a copy can be found at http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT