Fooling Around

// Oprogramowanie Roman Ryltsov

Utility Clearance: Rasterize Font

Posted on by Roman

RasterizeFont utility takes a font on the input (such as Windows .TTF – True-Type Font) and paints individual characters into bitmaps. Utility output includes separate bitmap (.BMP) files for requested characters and C++ source code of the bimap arrays (this was included into microcontroller project).

A configuration .INI file defines rasterizer parameters:

[General]
Width=48
Height=72
Horizontal Adjustment=1
Vertical Adjustment=0
Outline=1

[Font]
Face=Times New Roman
Height=48
Weight=1024

[Bitmaps]
PathTemplate=Character-%04x.bmp

And a list of characters of interest is passed as a command line argument.

const BYTE pnCharacter007a[] = // 0x007a z
{
    0x55, 0x55, 0x55,  // 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 
    0x55, 0x55, 0x55,  // 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 
    0x55, 0x55, 0x55,  // 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 
    0x54, 0x00, 0x05,  // 01 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 
    0x52, 0xaa, 0xa1,  // 01 01 00 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 00 01 
    0x52, 0x00, 0xa1,  // 01 01 00 10 00 00 00 00 10 10 00 01 
    0x54, 0x42, 0x85,  // 01 01 01 00 01 00 00 10 10 00 01 01 
    0x55, 0x2a, 0x15,  // 01 01 01 01 00 10 10 10 00 01 01 01 
    0x54, 0xa0, 0x45,  // 01 01 01 00 10 10 00 00 01 00 01 01 
    0x52, 0x80, 0x21,  // 01 01 00 10 10 00 00 00 00 10 00 01 
    0x52, 0xaa, 0xa1,  // 01 01 00 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 00 01 
    0x54, 0x00, 0x05,  // 01 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 
    0x55, 0x55, 0x55,  // 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 
    0x55, 0x55, 0x55,  // 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 
};

A binary [Win32] and Visual C++ .NET 2008 source code are available from SVN.

One Reply to “Utility Clearance: Rasterize Font”

  1. Where does the program get the .TTF file to process, lets say when specifying the statement “Face=Times New Roman” in the .ini file; what will the program do to find the Times New Roman font file?

    It takes a Windows font through Windows API. So it can be any font registered with Windows, such as residing in \Windows\Fonts or available through name mapping.

    What does the statement “Weight=1024” in the .ini file do?

    Refer to MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd145037%28v=VS.85%29.aspx “lfWeight” constants.

    Just FYI, I am using windows XP to activate the DOS window in order to activate the rasterizing program.

    It is a Windows application, you can run it directly too.

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