FBInk: A small tool/library to print crap on your screen!

[NiLuJe]

Released v1.8.1!

Mainly bugfixes, among which the UTF-8 issue discussed previously .
The OT/TTF renderer now also honors AA when using bgless/fgless/overlay rendering mode.
And because everything is terrible, it also explicitly blacklists Kobo system fonts, because we can't use them, as they're obfuscated :/.

It also fixes a regression in the fixed-cell font rendering, which happened to choose a smaller scaling multiplier than it should have on devices with a non-HD screen...

[NiLuJe]

Released v1.9.0!

Coming hot on the heels of 1.8.x, because it fixes OT/TTF rendering on 16bpp modesets... (it never actually worked, my bad :/).
It should also hopefully handle invalid font data better (i.e., fail gracefully instead of crashing).

The CLI tool will also try harder to validate user input, which should hopefully help make sense of things when you pass wrong/invalid arguments, or getopt does weird things to the arguments order...

(As an example, it will now catch overflows: for instance, if you pass a value >255 to the -S flag, it will tell you that you shouldn't, and that the error came from the value passed to the S flag in particular. It should also properly identify suboptions, f.g., showing it as t:size for the OT counterpart to S).

[NiLuJe]

Released v1.9.1!

A bunch of bugfixes, mainly, err, a DPI fix on the Forma. Oops.

[frostschutz]

a wild problem appeared (and I'm completely unable to reproduce it so this is just for the record)

for some reason fbink caused the display to rotate 180° today on my H2O, everything appeared upside down (but touch area did not rotate along with it)

happened as I left a book and went back to the homescreen, not sure if nickel does anything to rotation when that happens, or anything else that could race with fbink.

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by frostschutz

a wild problem appeared (and I'm completely unable to reproduce it so this is just for the record)

for some reason fbink caused the display to rotate 180° today on my H2O, everything appeared upside down (but touch area did not rotate along with it)

happened as I left a book and went back to the homescreen, not sure if nickel does anything to rotation when that happens, or anything else that could race with fbink.

Nickel resets the rotation when going to the home screen, the settings screen (except for reading settings), and a few others which do not support landscape. I'm not sure if it always resets it even if rotation is not enabled on the device.

[frostschutz]

I should say I'm still on whatever is the official firmware for the original H2O, so whatever forma does for rotation, I don't have. Also the only way to go back to normal was to reboot the device. (Guess I could've rotated it with telnet also but... I didn't try, sorry.)

After reboot I tried to reproduce it for a while (by spamming fbink calls through telnet among other things) but to no avail. Well, it's fine if it only happens one in a million...

[NiLuJe]

@frostschutz: Huh. That's mighty strange .

It never ever touches hardware rotation, and never even does any "PUT" fb ioctls, so I'm not quite sure how a "GET" could potentially race with anything. If it did, I'd expect fbink to get messed up, not Nickel ;p.

Not familiar enough with the intricacies of ioctl handling in the Linux fb/epdc driver code to say if there could be weird-ass side-effects like that during an ioctl race .

[NiLuJe]

Hm, weirder still: I can confirm what @frostschutz just said: FW 5.9.x doesn't do any FBIO* ioctls when switching to/from the Homescreen on the H2O.

Which would imply that if ioctl race there was, it'd have been between concurrent instances of fbink itself, which would: one, take some effort to actually achieve (and, err, I would just say try to avoid doing it? ); and two, makes this even more mysterious as it never ever does a FBIOPUT... :?


Gremlins? ;p

[NiLuJe]

The fact that it's a 180° rotation is also interesting: the H2O panel is mounted upside down (unlike most other Kobo devices, except the Aura HD and possibly the H2O²), so Nickel actually runs in a specific rotation designed to handle that, which doesn't match that of other devices (rotate 1 vs. rotate 3 for others).

This is interesting because the only other source of rotation shenanigans is the boot process, and pickel, and both are Landscape, so the other two rotations lefts (0 & 2).

Which means it looks like its definitely nickel forgetting itself and thinking it's running on something that's not an H2O (for some reason).

Or something. .

NOTE: I say "upside down" relative to other Kobos. NTX mounts panels in a weird-ass native orientation that is definitely NOT Upright Portrait.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by geek1011

Nickel resets the rotation when going to the home screen, the settings screen (except for reading settings), and a few others which do not support landscape. I'm not sure if it always resets it even if rotation is not enabled on the device.

No, all the screens support landscape mode. If you turn on the mode via the config file, everything is rotated. The settings work correctly and this explains some changes I had noticed recently. The home screen and library lists all work, but are ugly and need some redesign to take advantage of landscape mode.

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by davidfor

No, all the screens support landscape mode. If you turn on the mode via the config file, everything is rotated. The settings work correctly and this explains some changes I had noticed recently. The home screen and library lists all work, but are ugly and need some redesign to take advantage of landscape mode.

Yep, you're right. I was looking at this by following the Forma's code, but after a second look, it seems to apply to everything if done through the config file (or by patching that part, instead of the Forma part).

[NiLuJe]

Of potential interest to people with a strong aversion to C, or for whatever reason (prototyping?), I've whipped up basic FFI bindings for LuaJIT & Python .

The Python bindings are bundled in my usual bag of tricks .

The full list of available bindings is in the README. Right now, that's @sherman's Go bindings and those two .

[bobotrax]

Hi,
I use your program that I find practical .
However, I would like to write a "sting" that starts with the sign "-" how to do it?
For example:
fbink "-25"
Fbink takes my "string" for an argument. Is there no escape character or other trick?
Thank you in advance.

PS. I write very badly in English, sorry.

[NiLuJe]

@bobotrax: fbink -mM -- "-25"

Anything that comes *after* the double dash will bypass option parsing .

That's a standard GNU behavior, FYI .

[bobotrax]

Great, thank you.