utf-8 for RPL source code

[Claudio L.]

(04-22-2015 01:06 AM)Helix Wrote:  I've also slightly modified these fonts, both the standard font and the minifont, to make them more appealing to my taste. Will this feature be present in newRPL ? I would prefer that than having 27000 fixed characters…

Maybe my post is totally off-topic, but I don't understand what you wrote above.
I just want to tell you good luck!

The first thing needed after a proper UTF-8 string manipulation is a good font to display the strings!
newRPL uses variable width bitmapped fonts. If you like designing fonts and want to help, that's an area where I'd appreciate help.
All you need to do is create a bitmap in any format (BMP, GIF, etc., anything except JPG, PNG or other formats that use "lossy" compression).
Right now we have 5 pixel high fonts, 6 pixels high and 7 pixels high. The original HP large font is 8 pixels high and the minifont is 6 but narrow.
Designing a font is easy, all you have to do is use any bitmap editor (GIMP, Photoshop, MS Paint), and create a black and white bitmap with 1 pixel more in height than what you intend to use for the font, and as wide as you want.
The additional row will help separate the individual characters later.
For example, the letters A and B on a 5-pixels font could be (here goes my ASCII art):

Code:


_XX__XXX__...
X__X_XXX__...
XXXX_X__X_...
X__X_XXX__...  (4 lines for the characters)
__________... (this line separates the rows)
XXXXX_____... (this line has 5 black pixels for the A, then 5 whites for the B, then it will have 4 or 5 blacks for the C, etc.)

So a 5-pixel font should have a 6-pixel bitmap with the lower row alternating black and white wherever a character changes. Characters can be any width, but I think up to 8 pixels max.
The bitmap should have the symbols for all characters in the HP48 codepage (see here), and any additional symbols you want, not necessarily in any particular order.
Of course, together with the bitmap, I'll need a list in a text file that tells me which unicode characters you have in the bitmap, from left to right.
Once you have a font I'll take it from there, as I have a program that will convert it automatically to the proper format for newRPL.
Just make sure you don't steal anything from copyrighted fonts, since newRPL (and therefore its fonts) will be released under the BSD license, we don't want to impose any restrictions on the users or have copyright claims later.

And you thought it was off-topic?