Figure 1. Main window
Figure 1. Main window
Hi there! Here you can find good desktop application for drawing monochrome bitmap fonts dedicated for embedded systems which have some kind of low-resolution displays. For example, LED matrices. By the way you may see them on a street in a form of various small information tables. Let's say, a table with next station name in a bus.
When you open the application (further - "Editor"), you see something looking like on a figure 1. You can load some font in specific SGFED format (link for a sample 8x8 font - below) or draw it from scratch. Or even render it from any system font currently installed. The simplest instrument for drawing of course is a pencil working pixel-by-pixel. Other instruments offer an option to move and stretch arbitrary regions on a drawing canvas (left side of the main window). And placing monochrome bitmap image onto a canvas.
Most interesting thing is an ability to export created font into a binary or text data blob acceptable for usage in an embedded system. There is a comprehensive exporting procedure with many options inside Editor. Moreover Editor can be driven from scripts to get values of separate symbols and their pixels in case if the exporting procedure's opportunities are not enough for your purposes.
32-bit installer for Windows - Direct Download.
Sample 8x8 font - Direct Download.
The application was written originally for 32-bit Windows 98/XP in 2004-2005. Visual Studio 2003 with MFC toolkit was used in those days. Recently in 2019 I've spent some time to make refactoring and improvement and rebuild it under fresh Visual Studio 2017 for recent versions of Windows (debugged under Windows 7). Despite my current position regarding MFC it's still there and the app is not cross-compiled under other operation systems. But I've checked it under "Wine" compatibility layer in Linux and it looks fine.
You are welcome to write me, Vyacheslav Grigoryev, about any found bugs or possible further improvements. Please use
on this domain.
Or contact with me by any means described in Editor's help, "Introduction" page.
The only thing which I need to mention is that the program is free software. I get no fee for it. So will work on
improvements if I have a passion. But fixing bugs has higher priority for me.
Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/vyacheslav-grigoryev-58360941