Add a complete SD card font subsystem that enables users to install and
use custom fonts beyond the three built-in families. This combines the
back-end firmware support (#1327) with the font configuration, build
pipeline, CI distribution, and user-facing management UI (#1392).
Core font system:
- Custom .cpfont binary format (v4) with multi-style support (regular,
bold, italic, bold-italic) packed into a single file per size
- On-demand glyph loading from SD card with two-pass prewarm rendering
to bulk-read glyphs per page, achieving near-flash performance for
Latin text (~697ms vs ~681ms) and viable CJK rendering (~32% slower)
- Persistent advance cache for layout measurement without SD I/O
- Overflow ring buffer for glyph cache misses during rendering
- Memory-conscious design: only advance tables kept in RAM; glyph
bitmaps, kern tables, and ligatures loaded on demand from SD
Font management:
- On-device WiFi download from GitHub Releases with manifest-based
discovery, install/update detection, and progress UI
- Web interface font upload, listing, and deletion via /fonts page
- Manual SD card copy to /fonts/ or /.fonts/ directories
- Font selection integrated into Settings > Reader > Font Family
Build pipeline:
- Declarative YAML config (sd-fonts.yaml) as single source of truth
for the 17-family font library (serif, sans, mono, accessibility)
- Python converter (fontconvert_sdcard.py) for TTF/OTF to .cpfont with
FreeType rasterization, class-based kerning, and ligature extraction
- Parallel build orchestrator with variable font instance extraction
- CI workflow publishing versioned + stable releases to a dedicated
crosspoint-fonts repository with auto-incrementing revision tags
- Centralized version constants (cpfont_version.py) shared across
build tooling and CI, with firmware headers as manual sync points
Additional fixes:
- CJK characters no longer get hyphens inserted at line breaks
- Advance table eliminates 30+ second stalls during CJK section
indexing for paragraphs with >512 unique codepoints
Closes#930
Co-authored-by: Zach Nelson <zach@zdnelson.com>
Co-authored-by: Justin <itsthisjustin@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: jpirnay <jens@pirnay.com>
Co-authored-by: mcrosson <kemonine@kemonine.info>
Husam Younis