How to load custom fonts for inky frame?

[303]

Hi, yes I’ve seen the other threads.
I’ve exported a bdf file from fontforge. But I can’t figure out how to get picographics/inky/micropython to actually load and use an external font. Can anyone share how they did this with success?

Thank you!

[bablokb]

Which other threads are you referring to? AFAIK, it is CircuitPython that supports BDF files, not MicroPython. But I might have missed something.

[303]

Picographics Library - Can you use ttf fonts or other more scalable fonts?

I am using the Inky Frame 5.7 with Pico onboard. Previously I have used the 4inch verison on the raspberry pi so could just use pillow to draw everything i needed including text. When it comes to fonts in the picogrpahics library the selection seems limited with the bitmap and a few hershey ones which look blocky. Is there a way to use ttf fonts with picographics so you can get better qulaity if the files are stored on the sd card? If not is there a way to create much larger higher quality f…

[bablokb]

If you read my answer in the cited post, you will see that I am talking about bitmap fonts and not BDF (the link to the guide posted at the end of that thread is a not from me and a bit misleading).

So your way to success is to use fontforge to create a bitmap font of the given size, and then use some obscure tool that you find in the Internet to convert it to a C-header file and then you would patch MicroPython to use your bitmap font instead of the one that is supplied.

Fonts are one of the reasons I use CircuitPython instead of MicroPython.

But Pimoroni added a new feature recently to (at least some of) their builds: “pico-vector” pimoroni-pico/libraries/pico_vector at main · pimoroni/pimoroni-pico · GitHub

Looking at the source code, it seems it can load vector fonts, but all of this is not documented on a user level. But maybe someone else can help here.