Bytemap screen font support for Mini Micro
This repo provides code to read and render bitmap fonts in the "ByteMap Font" (BMF) format, as described here: https://bmf.php5.cz/?page=format
It also includes some sample font files that I believe to be in the public domain. You can find thousands more at the web site above.
Use this code with Mini Micro. Mini Micro is a fun, free, retro-style virtual computer based on MiniScript, which is itself a clean, simple, modern scripting language.
Place the bmfFonts.ms file somewhere in your import path (the current working directory will do; /usr/lib is also a good place). Then use import "bmfFonts" to load the bmfFonts module, and bmfFonts.Font.load to load a font.
import "bmfFonts"
// Load a font
f = bmfFonts.Font.load("fonts/ming.bmf")
// Print a string in that font to gfx
f.print "Hello world!", 20, 500
// Get a character image, and make a Sprite out of it
spr = new Sprite
spr.image = f.getCharImage("R")
spr.x = 600
spr.y = 500
spr.scale = 3
spr.rotation = 30
display(4).sprites.push spr
The Font.print method also takes an optional scale parameter (defaults to 1.0), allowing you to print larger or smaller than the default.
If you run bmfFonts.demo (or load and run the module directly instead of using import), it will look for the fonts folder, and draw a string with each one. The final font will be drawn at 3X scale at the bottom of the screen. The result should look something like this:
You can recolor a font by changing its palette. This works especially well with grayscale fonts, like fonts/ari14b.bmf (Arial 14pt bold). Example:
font = bmfFonts.Font.load("fonts/ari14b.bmf")
n = font.palette.len
for i in range(1,n)
f.palette[i-1] = color.lerp(color.black, color.lime, i/n)
end for
font.print "Hello world!", 100,100
Note that this must be done before printing with the font, as the character images are cached. You can always load a fresh font object to draw in a new color.
Or, you can tint fonts as you draw them, just like tinting a sprite or using a tint color with drawImage. To do this, supply the optional scale and color parameters to Font.print.
This code supports both version 1.1 and version 1.2 of the BMF format. Version 1.2 is a recent but significant upgrade, adding support for non-ASCII Unicode characters, kerning, and an alpha channel for anti-aliased fonts.
This repo includes a util folder with a couple of utility programs. These are not needed at runtime, but may be helpful to you in preparing your own fonts. These are:
- unpack.ms: simple utility to unpack a BMF file into a folder full of files, one image per glyph, plus a text file (in GRFON format) describing the font metrics etc.
- pack.ms: performs the reverse operation, taking a folder full of files as produced by unpack, and generating a .bmf font file.
- fontEdit.ms: a work in progress font editor. Not really usable yet; see GitHub issues (and coming soon, bounties!) for further development of this tool.