Licensing Fonts for Graphic LCD???

Which country are you operating in and which country do you intend to sell to. In Europe fonts are copyrightable so like any copyrighted materials they are protected under law. In the US fonts are not copyrightable so regardless of what font companies tell you the law says you can freely use fonts without paying for it. Also beware that technically the US is supposed to respect fonts copyrights for fonts created outside the US.

In general (and the details vary somewhat by country) if it's for your own use as, e.g., a hobby system, probably not required. If it's for a commercial venture, almost certainly, unless you start with a typeface that is unlicensed or unrestricted. But if you want to use Adobe Garamond commercially, you'll need to contact Adobe.

OTOH, there are several utilities out there that are aimed at bitmapped fonts (vice scaleable, vector fonts). See

for one tool that includes a couple of apparently free 8- and 16-pixel high fonts and a code generator for the bitmaps.

Note that tools that import TTF/T1/OpenType font files and export the glyphs as bitmaps do NOT "strip away" the original copyright/license for the file, even if the physical copyright notice is removed in the output. There is some discussion of this at

Some free fonts here (googled; I haven't tried any of them)

One solution is to use fonts published under licenses that allow free commercial use. The X Window System (www.x.org) contains a large set of bitmap fonts in various sizes. If you want scalable fonts, try Bitstream Vera and Vera Sans

Marc

There is more discussion at

which says exactly the opposite; i.e., bitmap fonts cannot be copyrighted, regardless of their origin.

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John W. Temples, III

In message , Rich Webb writes

MOI -- do you happen to know of any such tools, preferably freeware? I need a set of hi-res bitmaps (100 x 100) of the Jouhou Japanese kanji for a particular image-analysis project (a hobby project I should hasten to add) I've been thinking of doing for a while. A fontfile -> bitmap creation tool would be very useful to me.

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 To reply, my gmail address is nojay1              Robert Sneddon

Yes, if the original face was a bitmap. A bitmap derived by machine translation from a licensed, commercial outline font may not be but that's why the lawyers get the big bucks.

Bitmaps get special treatment because of the limited image space available to distinguish, e.g., an 'e' from a 'c', so everybody uses pretty much the same 5x7 font, for example.

IANAL (nor do I play one on teevee nor am I running for President as an actor who plays a lawyer...) It's almost certainly infringing to resell a bitmap face derived from a commercial font but, of course, that's not the issue.

It's probably okay if the font is included as an incidental part of the product. This would be along the lines of selling a pdf e-book that includes embedded font information. The original font vendor doesn't get or expect any additional fees or royalty payments even thought a substantial subset of the typeface is included in the file.

I've seen screen capture pathways used for this. You choose a font size to set the appx pixel count, and then capture a bitmap off the screen and work from there.

-jg

I considered this but I'd need to do about 2000 kanji characters (at least in stage 2 of the project) and unless I could script this and run it automatically it'd be a lot of work. I'd also want to do several different fonts if possible.

The idea is to produce a little OCR-type software tool to help me identify Japanese kanji in scanned images by comparing the scan with a stored suite of existing kanji bitmaps.

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 To reply, my gmail address is nojay1              Robert Sneddon

There is a utility called ttf2bdf (or otf2bdf), part of the freetype project. I use the version that comes with my linux distribution, but a google search will reveal others.

This can then be used to convert your TTF files into BDF (bitmap distribution format).

BDF is fairly simple and well documented,

.

It is an ascii file which you can read in to your software, or perhaps use some other utility to convert to the format of your choice.

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John Devereux

Did some looking around. BitFontCreator

seems to be the most widely known translator.

It's aimed at bog-standard ASCII but it does bring in Unicode code pages with a few extra clicks. You'll need the encoding maps from

and a couple of peeks at the app's help file but it did import the glyphs (from an appropriate font) and produced a nice C file.

One note is that it got seriously slow after the first couple hundred characters. One core was stuck at 100% for quite a while; finished okay and the result looks correct but a One Big File approach may not be optimal.

If you already have this HW setup, then why not use that to create the font table ? I presume you will have some sort of user learn mode ?

To automate it a little more, you could add a numeric OCR (even 7 segment) area so that any symbol, can be numerically tagged for automated readin.

-jg

No, not really. The idea is to pre-analyse the font bitmap samples using assorted techniques, most of which involve counting black/white pixel ratios in various zones of the image (hence the requirement for normalised bitmaps). These numbers are stored in a simple database.

I scan in the text or image, clip the kanji I want to the PC's clipboard and trigger my OCR applet. It normalises the character image, forces it to 1-bit B/W and then runs it through the same analyser as I fed the samples through. The best 10 (say) matches to the database are presented as "possibles" for me to select the correct match by eye.

Learning would only be of much use if I was always scanning the same font in. In reality I would be scanning in mixtures of kanji, including handwritten characters.

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 To reply, my gmail address is nojay1              Robert Sneddon

and a couple of peeks at the app's help file

I also used BitFontCreator. It works well to create bitmap data based ASCII. But when i translate thousands of Unicode glyphs, BitFontCreator may take half an hour, though the result is correct.

I used a fontfile -> bitmap creation tool: BitFontCreator, which mayb suit your need. BitFontCreator works fine to export bitmap data base ASCII. But if you want to translate thousand of Unicode glyphs, you mayb wait half an hour, though the result is correct.