Question

I am writing a low level C app, and I’m planning on using an array to store my fonts.

The problem is, the font I’d like to use is in TrueType format. How shall I:

1. Convert TTF to a large sized, B&W, bitmap
   font without any kind of AA (not strictly programming
   related);

2. Parse the B&W bitmap font into a C byte array.

What format should I use for the bitmap? Should be simple enough that me, a beginner programmer with little over a year of experience can write a parser to store it in said array.

I don’t want to use external libraries, and I’d like to keep C Std. Lib. usage to a minimum. It’s for a college project and I want to write everything myself.

Answer 1

It’s not the most professional or cleanest, but here’s what I’d do in your situation:

• Choose a monospaced font and a size where each character is an integral number of pixels.
• Open GIMP (or your favorite image editing program) and make an image that’s font_width pixels wide and font_height*96 pixels tall.
• Make a text element anchored at the upper-left corner containing <space> <newline> ! <newline> " <newline> # <newline> … (i.e. all the ASCII glyphs).
• Save it as an uncompressed image format that’s easy to process, like PNM.
• Load it into an array of type uint8_t [96][font_height][font_width].