chinese / japanese font in portrait

[jaloman]

Hi, great to member of gameduino community.

I want to design a user interface with 480x272 in portrait and show chinese font.
but the asset tool can not convert chinese font, so maybe i can use font like sprite.
gd2 do not have tool for convert sprite, what can i do ?

anyone have experience on this ?

[jamesbowman]

Hi Jaloman, welcome! Yes, you are correct. The "font" tools are only suitable for font with ASCII characters 32-127.

For Chinese and Japanese the best way would be to load each character as it is required, just like sprites. This thread talks about the way to load sprites:

gameduino2.proboards.com/thread/127/bitmap-cells-frustration

So I am thinking of an "Xf" package to handle extended fonts. The character data would be on SDcard. Then a single method "Xf.text()" translates from UTF-8 characters to unicode, and loads the unicode characters as sprites from SDcard.

#include <EEPROM.h>
#include <SPI.h>
#include <GD2.h>

void setup()
{
 GD.begin();
 Xf.begin("cn-24x24");  // Chinese 24x24
}

void loop()
{
 GD.ClearColorRGB(0x103000);
 GD.Clear();
 GD.cmd_text(240, 136, Xf.font, OPT_CENTER, Xf.text("你好，世界"));
 GD.swap();
}
I think this would be an excellent demo -- I would be very happy to work with you on this. Do you have a Chinese or Japanese bitmap set in mind?

[jaloman]

Dear James, Thanks for your kindly advice, it would be great with unicode support on gd2.
there are a lot of font extractor tools(dot matrix)out there help to get even a full unicode font.bin.
by now, with the sprite support will fullfill me request.
but I can not make asset python or sprite tool work.

IOError: cannot identify image file 'G:\\Gameduino2\\gd2asset\\sprite.png'

[jaloman]

IOError issue resolved by change "import Image" to "from PIL import Image"

here is the modified py

from PIL import Image
import gameduino2 as gd2

class Walk(gd2.prep.AssetBin):

def addall(self):
walk = gd2.prep.split(32, 32, Image.open("walk.png"))[1:]
self.load_handle("WALK", walk, gd2.ARGB1555)

if __name__ == '__main__':
Walk().make()

but can I rotate clockwise 90 degree on each sprite when convert ?

[jaloman]

modify walk.py for my font.png which is 22x24 per character in serial, ARGB2, transparent color set to background

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from PIL import Image
import gameduino2 as gd2

class Walk(gd2.prep.AssetBin):

def addall(self):
walk = gd2.prep.split(22, 24, Image.open("FONT.png"))[0:]
self.load_handle("FONT", walk, gd2.ARGB2)

if __name__ == '__main__':
Walk().make()

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and add rotate to split(tw, th, im) in prep.py for my portrait screen layout

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
def split(tw, th, im):
tiles = []
for y in range(0, im.size[1], th):
for x in range(0, im.size[0], tw):
nim = im.crop((x, y, x + tw, y + th));
nim2 = nim.transpose( Image.ROTATE_270 )
tiles.append(nim2)
return tiles
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[jaloman]

please find attached font.png for reference

simply use it as sprite to show japan font in portrait

GD.Begin(BITMAPS);
GD.Vertex2ii(420, 67, FONT_HANDLE, 39);

Attachments:

[BrewBot]

Hello Everyone

Can you comment whether any improvements on the above methods have been made? Looking to translate an English program I have written into Japanese and want to do so in the most efficient manner possible.

Jason