uGUI is a free open source graphics library for embedded systems. To display text, it uses bitmap/raster fonts, that are included in application as C-language structs & arrays. uGUI includes some fonts in itself, but I wanted to use some TrueType fonts.
I didn't find a tool that would convert a .ttf file into C structures used by uGUI easily, so I wrote one using Freetype library.
This is a simple utility to convert TrueType fonts into uGUI compatible structures. It reads font file, renders each character into bitmap and outputs it as uGUI compatible C structure.
Optionally it can display ascii art sample of font by using UGUI to render pixels as '*' with ansi escape sequences. Fonts generated with 8BPP show in blue pixels with less then 100% fill.
Please remember to respect font copyrights when converting.
Examples:
Convert font in Luna.ttf to 14 point size bitmap font for 140 DPI display:
ttf2ugui --font Luna.ttf --dpi 140 --size 14 --dump
Results are in Luna.c and Luna.h, just compile the .c and include .h in your uGUI application.
Show ascii art of same font:
ttf2ugui --font Luna.ttf --dpi 140 --size 14 --show "aString"
If you want to generate 8BPP fonts ( so you get anti alliased fonts ) use
ttf2ugui --font Luna.ttf --dpi 140 --size 14 --show "aString" --bpp=8
To compile, freetype library is needed. Easiest way to get is to install suitable package for your operating system.
For FreeBSD, install "print/freetype2". For Debian, install libfreetype6-dev with apt-get.
Then, just type "make".