[ft] Is freetype the right program for a small embedded printing system?

[Jungle Jim]

Hi all,

This is a newbie question, but having spent hours googling with no luck I
need to ask the experts.

I have to develop an industrial printer that uses an HP-type ink jet print
head. It is a very low cost embedded system with limited RAM (probably <128K
- note not 128 Meg, 128K!) and about the same in ROM. I need to build in a
font with only three sizes. Assuming the head has 512 dots the three fonts
will be 512 pixels , 256 pixels or 128 pixels high, So I get effectively a
full height, half height and quarter height font.

It will only print monochrome, and as it is an industrial device the
effective resolution could be low i.e. the 128 dot font could be constructed
from blocks of 4 x 4 pixels. The font can be very basic, it can be
monospaced if that makes life easier. The ideal soluton is to code the fonts
into the ROM, but even with just 64 characters the full height font takes up
more than my entire ROM space.

The system can be allowed to take ages to formulate a text string from the
chosen fonts but will need to print at short notice. I therefore plan to
generate a text string into memory and then shift the dot pattern out to the
head when it is needed.

Am I right in thinking that if I can get a small base font that I can fit
into my miniscule ROM, I can then use freetype to expand each character from
the font as I need it into RAM? Am I also right in thinking that I can
minimise the overhead of freetype so that I can fit it, along with all the
other code my device will need, into a small ROM area?

If anybody has done something like this I would love to hear about their
experience.



 
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