New Approach to Scaled Fonts on Small Displays
Thought this was a clever concept, and something I'd never considered: https://www.hackster.io/news/smooth-big-text-for-little-graphics-displays-686540827fd2
Basiclaly, when you scale up a very small font to a customized higher-rez font it either looks blocky because you're not filling in all the corners that you could, or it takes a lot more memory because you're geometrially scaling it. This idea basically scales things up directly, but adds a couple helper routines to fill in the corners programatically.
A good reminder to consider different ways to solve/improve a problem!
Hackster.io
Smooth Big Text For Little Graphics Displays
David Johnson-Davies explains how to efficiently and accurately smooth characters for small displays.
1 Reply
I experienced this with an OLED display when I replaced the 0.96" SSD1306 with a 1.3" OLED. The fonts on the larger display didn't appear as appealing as they did on the smaller one. However, I found these posts very helpful in understanding how to smooth larger text.
Glad you enjoyed them. I thought it was rather clever. The site that the article links - technoblogy.com generally has some neat optimizations and experiments, especially with low-resource devices like the ATtiny line. Worth checking out IMO.
That being said, did the resolution increase too when you went to the 1.3" OLED? If not, you're largely stuck with the blown up low-resolution look AFAIK.
Yes, the resolution did increase. I think the more visible edges of the fonts, especially in small spaces, made them look a bit weird. I'm not working actively on that firmware at the moment, but I have bookmarked both linked articles from Technoblogy to try out the example routine that David presented in his blog.