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: "!@#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]\:";'<>?,./`~
                         ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789ÄÖÜßäöü")
  -n, --name=file        Output name (without extension) (default: null)
  -d, --dir=dir          Output directory (default: ".")
      --section=name     Section for font data
      --rle=rle          Use RLE compression (default: 0)
      --append           Append str to filename, structs (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

Locale

Fontem does not make use of any localization mechanism to translate diagnostic messages, but it does require a working locale to properly interpret wide characters; note that several characters that fall outside of ASCII-7 exist in the default character set that fontem will generate fonts for.

Some stripped-down systems (such as container images) may need a locales package and/or an appropriate language package. For English on Ubuntu this would require the package language-pack-en. On such systems it is likely the system locale has not been set, so use of the LC_ALL environment variable may be required, or configuring the system locale. The page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Locale may provide guidance.

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