TDF is comprised of two panes – the input pane on the left (what you want to generate) and the output pane on the right (the generated output, in C code). While it is possible to generate this manually, it is desired to have a tool to do our grunt work by converting windows fonts (given a size and decoration) into a series of bitmaps.

Consequently, we must store the exact appearance of a character as a series of 1s and 0s, equivalent to a “dot on” “dot off” on the LCD, and upload this as a bitmap when we want to display text. While there are software graphic libraries that allow us to generate a character “on the fly” using vector graphics (the character is described as a series of drawing commands that allow scaling and decoration) – these are much too complex and large to integrate in a microcontroller environment. It is up to our software to decide what to upload when we want to draw lines, circles and more importantly – text. The actual LCD controller allows us to upload simple visual data (dot on or dot off) into the LCD’s dot matrix, but not much else. Working with dot matrix LCDs with microcontrollers, while not difficult, is tedious. It is written in C# for Visual Studio 2008 and has been tested on Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 7 and Linux via Mono. These fonts are then uploaded via the LCD driver (see the Drivers and Modules page for a few) to the actual dot matrix LCD. The Dot Factory is a small open source tool (MIT licensed) intended to generate the required C language information to store many fonts and images, as efficiently as possible, on a microcontroller.

Tools The Dot Factory: An LCD Font and Image Generator.

Bitmap font creator