The GLCDlib library for the Graphics Board has been extended to support multiple fonts!

If you look closely, you’ll see that even kerning has been implemented – making italics much nicer.

The main use I see for this is not so much about going overboard with all sort of “roman”, “italic”, or “bold” mixes (although now you can), but to mix different font sizes on the same screen (large values, small labels, etc).

Here’s the new font_demo.pde sketch which produces the above display:

That’s just 7 of the 250+ fonts and variations now present in the GLCD library :)

To use a font, include the proper header in your sketch, and call glcd.setFont() to activate it. The thing to keep in mind is that fonts use up flash memory space. I’ve come up with a fairly compact way to store them, but larger fonts obviously need more memory than tiny ones, especially if they include all ASCII character codes. Also, proportional fonts need more space than mono-spaced fonts, due to extra per-character width / offset info.

Here is an overview of the amount of memory needed for each font, sorted by size:

    246   micro
    294   4x6
    294   clR4x6
    366   clR5x6
    426   5x7
    438   clR6x6
    486   5x8
    486   clR5x8
    582   clR6x8
    606   clR5x10
    ...
    7099  helvBO24
    7165  charB24
    7240  ncenI24
    7376  lubB24
    7478  lubI24
    7529  charBI24
    7595  ncenBI24
    7762  luBS24
    8148  lubBI24
    8627  luBIS24

The above sketch compiles to 12572 bytes, of which about 8 Kb are fonts.

One last note: these changes mean that you now always have to set up some font before calling drawChar() or drawString(), there is no default (it might not be the one you want, or you might not need any fonts at all).