Foundry

[csboling]

foundry

norns font visualizer

Foundry lets you browse the glyphs for all the different fonts installed on norns so you can see what’s available and determine the right font face / character codes to use. You can view glyphs at different sizes and brightness levels, generate Lua code for drawing a particular glyph in your own script, and attach a keyboard to type in example text.

Foundry does not know anything about the contents of the fonts, it is just using screen.text to draw everything, and is just looking at every possible character code. Some fonts have many more glyphs than others so many fonts will have large blank regions, there are some button / encoder combos to help with skipping over large numbers of glyphs.

Note that only the first 24 fonts are truetype fonts, the rest are bitmap fonts and the antialiasing option has no effect. The bitmap fonts appear to use an interpolated scaling algorithm (bicubic?) rather than nearest-neighbor, this I think is controlled at the cairo level (inside matron).

Requirements

Keyboard optional, currently only used for the text input mode.

Documentation

-- E1 at any time to change font
--    hold E1 to see font names
--
-- K3 descends down a UI level
-- K2 ascends up a UI level
--
-- first level: glyph selector
--   E2 selects y position
--
--   E3 selects x position
--
--   hold K2: y scrolls 8x
--
-- second level: glyph viewer
--   E2 selects parameter
--
--   E3 selects parameter value
--
--   hold K3: scroll glyphs 100x
--
--   press K3 on 'code':
--   print glyph drawing code to
--   the console (maiden)
--
--   press K3 on 'text':
--   enter text input mode
--
-- third level: text input
--   attach a keyboard to
--   type example text
--   K3 to clear

Download

Available in the maiden package installer.

csboling/foundry

[tyleretters]

As a type nerd: this is awesome. As a developer: this is quite useful. unscii-8-thin.pcf is freaking gorgeous. Sent a small PR your way.

[tehn]

small bump for an incredibly useful utility

[itwasalienz]

@csboling

every possible character code. Some fonts have many more glyphs than others so many fonts will have large blank regions, there are some button / encoder combos to help with skipping over large numbers of glyphs.

Note that only the first 24 fonts are truetype fonts, the rest are bitmap fonts and the antialiasing option has no effect. The bitmap fonts appear to use an interpolated scaling algorithm (bicubic?) rather than nearest-neighbor, this I think is controlled at the cairo level (inside matron).

WHAT?! How do you all know so much about fonts?! (i had no clue about truetype vs. bitmap, let alone that different fonts had a different number of ‘glyphs’ (always wondered how i could figure out ways to reproduce certain character-based designs without having to memorize them))
Thank You!

[sonoCircuit]

Oooh, great timing, thanks! Was looking for this script the other day and couldn‘t remember its name. Bookmarked!