Proposal for compressed font data? Any chance to get it accepted?

[holgerlembke]

Hi.

The other night I thought about a simple statistic-analysis+RLE-compression scheme for the fonts bitmap.

I just wrote a small test program to calc the ratio:

Numbers are:

• FreeMono8pt7b 19% saved
• FreeMono60pt7b 47% saved
• FreeMonoOblique66pt7b 47% saved
• Clock font FreeMono12pt7b 81% saved
• Clock font FreeMono72pt7b 46% saved

The overall expectation would follow that pattern: small fonts at about 20%, larger fonts at the 45% ballpark figure.

Decompression is super simple, needs about 18 bytes ram and some code. End user change would be zero, "drawChar" will detect the new font format and just use a different methode. Again, code change will be minimal.

Process would be: take the current font file and process it into a new file.

Of course, the resulting fonts are incompatible to current tools like Adafruit-GFX-Font-Customiser. But the sources still exist, so simply reprocess them...

Any chance that there would be a wider acceptance of these fonts to be used?

[moononournation]

U8g font support compression, support Unicode and easy to generate custom font. That's why Arduino_GFX added support U8g font.