Font Converter: Supports custom font ranges?

[RKBoss6]

Would it be possible on the Espruino Font Converter to have the option to set a custom range for what characters you want to include? It would make developing different apps that need custom fonts much easier. For me, I need the space char, but don't need any letters at all, only numbers and :. If we could make something that would allow this, I would envision it to be a dialogue box, where you can just type in all the characters you want, and it is able to get the relevant chars from the font for it. If anyone has any idea how to get started on this, or has any input on it, it would be very welcome!

[sonicityV]

Is there a reason not to use the numeric range for your project? It provides what you are looking for and only has like 2 unused characters ( . and / )

[RKBoss6]

Well, it doesn't have spaces, which is needed for proper clearing of the string, and the feature would be good as well for something like only needing vowels, or specific characters, without getting a huge base64 string that takes up memory, while only 10% of that is used...

[gfwilliams]

which is needed for proper clearing of the string

I'm not sure I understand this? I was pretty sure that if there was no space character you still ended up with a space when the space character was encountered? Or this is when using drawString(txt,x,y,true)? If so maybe I should change something in the firmware?

I've tended to veer away from using that now anyway - clearing the rect before drawing is probably faster in most cases - I'd only added the feature to reduce flicker on Bangle.js 1 where there is no buffering, but pretty much everything is buffered now.

... if you wanted to add different ranges (eg hexadecimal) then it's easy enough to fork and add to https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoWebTools/blob/master/fontconverter.js#L1088-L1096

Then https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoWebTools/blob/master/examples/fontconverter.html can be used to use that library (I just pushed some changes to bring it better inline with the website version)

I guess you could have a 'custom' entry in that dropdown and when you choose it a text box appears? I just wonder if many people would really use such a thing?

something like only needing vowels

... this feels like a bit of a stretch! All I can really think of is maybe a clock face that displays one or two extra chars on it?

[RKBoss6]

Yeah, I use drawString(... true), it's pretty handy so you don't have to hard-code the values in yourself for where to clear, unless there's a way to get the dimensions of a string... I think people would use the custom range, so I'll look into that. Thanks!

[gfwilliams]

unless there's a way to get the dimensions of a string...

g.stringWidth or g.stringMetrics for even more info :) But generally I find I have to be able to clear what was there before - so if you write 1000 once and then 10 later, you need to be able to get rid of the extra characters - so I tend to just fill the maxiumum area I think the text might ever take.

Thanks for taking a look at it! The font converter you use online is basically the same code (https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoDocs/blob/master/info/Font%20Converter.md) so if we can pull your changes back into the one everyone uses that'd be great!