Owen Carter Makes it Easier Than Ever to Find and Use Fonts for Small-Screen MicroPython Projects
With nearly 100 small-screen-suitable fonts and an easy-to-use Python class for displaying them, Carter's collection is ready to run.
Self-described "maker and geek" Owen Carter wants to make it easier to put readable and attractive text on small OLED and LCD screens connected to MicroPython devices — with a selection of hand-picked fonts and the EZ FrameBuffer Font Writer.
"[The EZ FrameBuffer Font Writer] is optimised for ease of installation and use," Carter explains of the tool, "especially for small 'info panel' type projects, and will work with any display that has a driver for the built-in MicroPython framebuffer. A selection of 'good' drivers is provided, along with some documentation on using your own driver, in the drivers folder."
The idea is simple: the EZ FrameBuffer Font Writer provides a Python class that takes suitably-processed fonts as its input and allows the user to easily format text for display on a framebuffer device. To make things even simpler, Carter has processed nearly a hundred publicly-available fonts — giving users a ready-made library from which to select how their text should look. "The selection provided here covers the default U8G2 fonts," Carter says, "a lot of common X11 fonts and the 'spleen' small font set. There are some symbol and icon fonts too."
For those simply looking for the fonts alone, Carter's collection is compatible with Peter Hinches' writer class. "This is a good class to use if you are driving a console-type display," Carter says, "since it has goodies like word-wrap, tab alignment, etc."
The EZ FrameBuffer Font Writer is available under the Creative Commons Zero public domain license on Carter's GitHub repository, along with the font collection.