[ANN] Timing Diagram Font - free

Looks superior in every respect, on first look. Nicely done!

Jon

Thanks for that, hope you find it useful...

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looks nice, but I don't understand why the horizontal lines are not equally thick ?

cheers, Stef Mientki

Great! Thank you!

A.D.

Very nice! I just started work on an interface speck for a modem today and needed to draw some timing diagrams for SPI and I2C transfers. I copied the .ttf file into

/usr/lib/openoffice/share/fonts/truetype

and it "just worked".

It even displays and prints properly when the document is exported from OOo as a PDF file.

The only think I could think of that might be added are transitions between "group" and low/high.

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I put mine in ~/.fonts/ and again it "just worked". Sweet. And ~/.fonts means you can use it as the default font in Firefox. Not as sweet, though ;-)

Yup. Many times signals go between "undefined" and a specific state. Not much room left to put them in, though. Might have to start replacing the accented letters.

Bold would be a bonus. The 1wire spec uses bold/dotted/normal to distinguish between "master driven", "undriven", and "slave driven". I suppose we could use colors, though. Or at least shades of grey.

Having decent group markers for a complex SPI design I had and good transitions for I2C to pulled up on seperate in and out SDA for I2C was one of my reasons for doing it.

That I assume was Linux flavo(u)r of *nix...

At this stage it was intended to use

{} (curly brackets/brace) for transition from group to tri-state [] (square brackets for transition from group to High/Low/Pulled=up

I will have to think how to easily get 4 more transition key mappings for high/low to or from group with group ending in 'chevrons'.

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The two forms of horizontal line I assume you mean are the mid character height single lines denoted for

Tri-state (underline key) Arrow Shaft (comma key)

If so then Arrow shaft is for placing between the left and right arrow heads to join a timing measurement line. This was needed to be distinct from Tri-state level (just as in most data sheets).

This way the signals have dominance in the 'diagram', and one can be quickly be distinguished from the other.

See the example image in the zip file and on the web site to see what I mean.

All other horizontal lines are supposed to be the same thickness as the tri-state character (even if in different positions).

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Please remember This is a Symbol font which means there are fewer codes available, however the bonus is in word processor documents this type of font is not supposed to be spell-checked!

Greyscale is something being considered for future versions, but as a symbol font might be limited. Colours definitely works.

Bold may be confusing on some symbols (undefined for starters).

Food for thought though.

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I'll assume you know more than I about that, but I've seen the symbol fonts in UTF-8 and they're HUGE.

I'll try not to imagine spell checking a timing diagram.

Well, "greyscale" is just color, limited to greys ;-)

I'm thinking "wide" signal lines vs "narrow" signal lines. It would be a completely separate font; the correlation to "bold" happens in the font's attributes.

Open Office seems to be able to synthetically bold and italicise the timing font, although their "bold" is almost the same as normal.

Yep. Gentoo to be specific. I'm sure there are both user-local and system-local places I should have put the file as well (if I leave it where it is, it'll probably "go away" the next time OOo gets updated).

That's what I used, and it's quite adequate. It's just that the sloped transition for the {} case and the square transition for the [] case are visually different enough that it might lead a reader to infer that the difference between square and slanted is meaningful.

It hadn't occurred to me that you were out of key symbols. Are ctrl characters allowed to have printable glyphs?

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...

...

Always the problem of updates.

Thanks for the details..

...

Well yes they are there, what I said 'badly' did not convey the meaning I meant, as I tried to group key mappings to make some form of sense. I grouped sets of keys together like Low/High/Tri-state/Pulled up deliberately. Rising and falling edge to be a bit more obvious from the keys Group start and end to be a bit more memorable.

If you have to spend too much time with a crib sheet doing it, you are always looking for the crib sheet, in Symbol font you effectively use Basic Latin coding subset of 253 codes (mapped from glyph addresses in a restricted range).

Also where possible to avoid + that is what people use for 'escape' sequences on various systems, e.g. CTRL-C, CTRL-[, ....

I don't know about anyone else but I use fonts like this in bursts of activity and do other things in between, so remembering which key mapping I wanted to be as simple as possible.

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Good work! That will save me a lot of tinkering about in Visio for my next timing diagrams. Many thanks

Truetype Symbol font basically uses glyphs $FF00 - $FFFF (with some reserved) to be compatible with more systems.

Unfortunately some people leave spell checking on all the time and I knew would complain about

"having to add strange combinations to their dictionary"

For video not fonts, fonts are either monochrome or greyscale. Setting the foreground/background to a single colour, still makes it monochrome. Creating the greylevel glyphs is a design level choice.

I realise that, but it is how the heavier weighting (and widening of lines) affects the symbols in particular 'undefined' and if the widening of lines part way through a signal line is acceptable.

It is always possible to do a slight 'dilation'/'erosion' of the characeter image, but that becomes application/platform dependent.

These are things I will look at for next release[1], after a few thoughts. It has taken me a few months to get round to creating this one.

[1] bearing in mind this gets done when I have some time, or is in parlances 'when I have some tuits of the the correct shape'.

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I know realise how much the smaller group of engineers are at least interested in this as in about 36 hours this font has been downloaded

90 times!

Thanks for your interest folks..

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