Struggling with fonts

[woodgrain]

Hi Team,

Thanks for this fun product!
I'm putting together a sensor information pack to provide additional resources currently not available, still early days but will release it once I've made some progress.

Could you please help me to make sense of managing the font sizes and characters?

I'm learning how to setup the data on the screen, I'm having a lot of issues getting the text to look good though.
The "Regular Font" is huge and I can't see a way of controlling it's size.
I can see that the "Square Font" has some sizing options, but not all of the characters seem to be available, such as "%", or perhaps it's being truncated somehow.
Some of the fonts such as "Numbers Font 2" look nice, but don't support some information such as hexadecimal values A - F

Thanks.

[TheLaGmAn]

are you doing this from a plugin?

The devices has some limitations so we werent unable to add multiple fonts, so there is only one font, the "regular font".
To be able to add some smaller numbers and texts we developed two alternatives:
1- Numeric font drawing from images, so there are 10 images per numeric font, from 0 to 9, but adding a whole font thru images wasnt possible due to the amount of images needed to do a complete font and the limited store stage (but you can implement this solution and should work, there is enough space to do it, but we just didnt want to leave the user with a small storage size due to this).
2- To add an alternative to the regular font to draw text we developed a square font which is created with lines (thats why its square, not because we wanted it a square), so that font is done thru the lines feature of the device, we didnt add all the characters tho, only a-z, 0-9 and some special ones.

If you are developing a plugin you can do the draw the sensors data with custom images yourself.

Sorry about those limitations, we are still looking into proper workarounds but might need a device change.

[woodgrain]

Ok, thanks for the info TheLaGmAn.
If there was a way of resizing the regular font on the screen would be good.
Is there a manual somewhere? That way I won't hassle you guys with obvious questions

Not a plugin, just a sensor pack to extend some of the features, I'll post some details when ready and you can give it a try if you like. I've only been playing with it for a few days in my (not so) spare time so will be a couple of days or weeks.

Cheers

[woodgrain]

I note that the whole Arial font is only about 900KB, how much space is available on the device?
As an idea regarding the space usage, you could convert all of the images from .jpg to .gif and it would cut down the size by about 95% while maintaining the same image quality.
I've attached my conversion of the .jpg to .gif but may be better results exporting directly from the original image files.

Cheers.

[TheLaGmAn]

Sadly there is no support in the device firmware to make a smaller regular font.

About the jpg/gif, it really doesnt matter because the device needs the data stored in raw bmp, what you see in your GOverlay folder gets converted in the upload process.

We are already working on a change for this but will probably require a new hardware.

[woodgrain]

Thanks for the feedback.

Unfortunately I'm not up on firmware, so I may be suggesting things that just can't be done, all good

My thinking was not so much adding additional fonts, but having 1 font on the device and then having the device manage the font size on the screen. The Arial font was just an example to illustrate that 1 whole font could be copied on and then the font size could be set on the screen itself rather than a fixed size. I don't know if this is possible, but would make it way more configurable if the 1 font can be set to different sizes

[TheLaGmAn]

Yea, no, its not possible, the device cant do font transformations (even if its a simple as a scale) thats why we couldnt do it

[woodgrain]

I've added a screenshot my my screen to date:
http://www.goverlay.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17&p=1403#p1403

Still figuring out the fonts, finding I'm having to use the square font a lot as it gives me more sizing, characters, and colours than the other options.

[TheLaGmAn]

Yea, we are looking into alternatives for that, we will have some solution soon, but probably wont be in the same display hardware.

[woodgrain]

Cool, for the price I'm happy to buy another screen if it will upgrade the functionality

If you're after ideas for the new system I've put some below, again I'm not familiar with what is possible so feel free to ignore whatever won't work lol:

• Different screen size options, 2.8" is nice for a little bit of info, but would love a bigger screen, like a 6" screen . Or perhaps a screen that takes up 2 bays in the front of the tower and can clip in, that'd be awesome!
• Ability to define the refresh interval of individual items to speed up the refresh time, for example the date or IP Address etc don't need to refresh from the registry every second, so could speed up the processing to update the screen components
• Ability to define z-order on screen items so we can pick which items will show top most
• Draw basic shapes, such as rectangle so we can put in frames, don't need them to refresh unless applied from the goverlay program
• Not sure if the GOverlay CPU usage can be reduced a bit, GOverlay is almost always the process being listed on my screen as the top process using 2-5% CPU consistently