Fonts

SDC uses TrueType (FreeType) fonts for its display. These fonts are vector based, meaning they can be drawn in any size without any pixellation effects. The default font used is defined internally to SDC and is a Sans Serif font. In addition to this there is one other font available called ‘lcd’ which you will see in use on the various demo pages.

There are plenty of online resources for downloading additional fonts that are free for personal use.

Adding new fonts

It is possible to add new TrueType fonts to SDC from the screen designer by using the “Add Font” button on the lower right hand side of the window. Once you have added a font, its name (the filename, without the extension) can be used in the font property. To make this easy, I recommend any font filenames containing spaces are renamed to a sensible short name without spaces or other special characters first, before uploading them to the device.

When a new font is used, it is converted internally from the TTF format to a binary format more suitable for SDC to use. This makes it quicker to load next time the software is started. This process will cause a slight pause in execution (1-2 secs depending on size of font and speed of device) while the conversion happens. The converted file will be stored in the fonts directory as \fonts\<fontname>.bin.

I also recommend that you do not use fonts that are particularly complicated, since each font requires an amount of video memory and takes more time to process when drawing a frame. I suggest selecting fonts whose TTF filesize is less than 1 megabyte.