Optimized font rendering on SPI LCDs
The P roblem The open source community has a few large contributors (e.g. Arduino, Google, Adafruit, Microsoft) and their contributions usually set the standard for certain projects and code libraries. I contribute to open source as a way of paying back what I've learned from it. This is not a knock on them to admit that performance is usually not their number one priority, while it usually is mine . Which brings us the reason for this blog post - drawing fonts on inexpensive LCD displays. This has been mostly the exclusive domain of Adafruit's GFX library, but the performance of that code is quite slow, especially on slow MCUs like the Arduino Uno. The Solution Adafruit created a good system of converting TrueType fonts into a simpler bitmap format that makes it easy to draw on low power MCUs. They converted the vector data into an array of small bitmaps with an index to reference the start and size of each bitmap. The performance problem comes from the way characters are dr...