[Kindle Touch] Text output demo

[JoppyFurr]

Hi,

I've started making the first steps towards the terminal emulator I'd like to write :3

This is a demo of text output, also showing the bitmap font I created for it.

The program shows some text, and counts the number of times you have touched the screen. You can do a full-refresh of the screen by releasing a touch in the top left, and you can exit the program by releasing a touch in the top right of the screen.

I have been compiling with: tccmake main -lpthread

Using the tcc package from Geekmaster's simple guide to tcc: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=175834


Enjoy :3
Joppy Furr

[geekmaster]

Interesting... I was working on my terminal emulator code again last night too... Competition is good because it stimulates improvement, then later we can borrow the best of each other's ideas for more improvements.

EDIT: I am a little curious though, why did you "create" your OWN bitmap font, when there are so many good public domain bitmap fonts that you can just copy/paste? And, for a table as large as a character map, why did you only store ONE BIT per byte? I am also curious just how you were able to create that many characters containing that many pixels, and type them all into a C program accurately in such a short amount of time... What tools did you use to create a font so quickly that is indeed completely your own with no credit to share with others? If you really wanted your font pixels packed just one bit per byte and you do not have problems with giving others credit for their work, couldn't you just write a quick little C program or script to unpack a public domain font and output your bit table to stick into your program?

[JoppyFurr]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

EDIT: I am a little curious though, why did you "create" your OWN bitmap font, when there are so many good public domain bitmap fonts that you can just copy/paste? And, for a table as large as a character map, why did you only store ONE BIT per byte? I am also curious just how you were able to create that many characters containing that many pixels, and type them all into a C program accurately in such a short amount of time... What tools did you use to create a font so quickly that is indeed completely your own with no credit to share with others? If you really wanted your font pixels packed just one bit per byte and you do not have problems with giving others credit for their work, couldn't you just write a quick little C program or script to unpack a public domain font and output your bit table to stick into your program?

I'm not sure about the licensing / rules around other fonts, so decided that the safest thing to do was to just make up my own and give it the same license as the rest of the program. I used GIMP to draw the font, which supports saving to a .h file, along with .jpg / .png, etc. From that .h file, I removed all code related to looking up colour values, leaving only the array of bytes that make up the image. With only the array of bytes remaining, I re-formatted the whitespace so that the characters line up when viewed in a text editor, and added a few #defines about character size.

As far as using only one bit per byte, I wasn't thinking of that at the time. Perhpas I'll get around to improving that eventually, but now that I have text showing, the next things I'd like to work on are a keyboard, which I've made a start on, and then implementing the terminal itself. Once I have the basics working, then I'll go through and tidy it up, adding extra features as I do.

I have a working font now, so will probably leave that alone until later. But once I've got the terminal working, I may eventually add support for opening a font file and UTF-8.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by JoppyFurr

I'm not sure about the licensing / rules around other fonts, so decided that the safest thing to do was to just make up my own and give it the same license as the rest of the program. I used GIMP to draw the font, which supports saving to a .h file, along with .jpg / .png, etc. From that .h file, I removed all code related to looking up colour values, leaving only the array of bytes that make up the image. With only the array of bytes remaining, I re-formatted the whitespace so that the characters line up when viewed in a text editor, and added a few #defines about character size.

As far as using only one bit per byte, I wasn't thinking of that at the time. Perhpas I'll get around to improving that eventually, but now that I have text showing, the next things I'd like to work on are a keyboard, which I've made a start on, and then implementing the terminal itself. Once I have the basics working, then I'll go through and tidy it up, adding extra features as I do.

I have a working font now, so will probably leave that alone until later. But once I've got the terminal working, I may eventually add support for opening a font file and UTF-8.

Thanks for publishing the unfinished code, so we can learn from it. I do the same myself, as you can see from a progression of versions of many of my apps.

The rules that I follow are 1) make it work, 2) make it small, 3) make it fast. Step 2 is where you pack your font bits.

For free liberally licensed fonts, check out the Vera fonts. For vector fonts, check out the Hershey fonts. Also, for C programs, a great simple GUI method is IMGUI: http://sol.gfxile.net/imgui/
Or, if you want a more "professional" GUI that is C compatible, but event driven (to save battery), check out IUP from the lua creators.