They’re also human-readable for the most part, which makes them easy to work with manually (lucky us!). I love the fact that the specification mentions the fonts are typically distributed on tape.īDF font files are sort of like a markup language in that they have open/close tags for lots of things and some “self-closing” tags for others. Given the age of the format (and the creation date comment fields from the fonts I patched), it’s really no surprise they didn’t support this character. This is an old bitmap font format from 1993, so, while old, it works great for the scoreboard’s purposes as it’s a mature format and very straightforward. In order to fix the issue, I needed to dive into the BDF 2.2 specification. Anything other than the patched fonts simply had no way to render this character, so they either displayed a generic missing character from the font or nothing at all in its place. Unbeknownst to me, the new refactor included a couple of patched fonts that were used by the smaller supported resolutions, and the play-by-play renderer now attempted to render called 3rd strikes with this character. It’s usually written by hand, but here this character is Unicode A4D8, and it’s close enough to an actual backwards K that we co-opt it for our purposesĪs you can imagine this is not very uncommon as batters strike out plenty of times, often with multiple strikeouts per team per game. There’s one wrinkle – when striking out on a called 3rd strike (so called out without swinging or “striking out looking”), the play is scored as a backwards K or ꓘ. When striking out, normally the play is scored as a K, allegedly because S was taken for “sacrifice”. If you’re familiar with baseball symbolism, it does have one strange symbol that’s not really found anywhere else. It’s as simple as reaching into the submodules/fonts directory and grabbing what you need.īackground on Baseball – Why We Need This
#Create a glyph tag driver#
Luckily for us, the matrix driver library includes plenty of font choices for us to use right out of the box.
It’s quite hard to fit lots of rows filled with 7x13 rectangular characters on a low-resolution matrix like 32x32, so you might choose to pick a smaller font like 4圆. It’s important to note that the different resolutions supported all can potentially use different fonts, as you would expect. (Shameless plug, that’s what RGBMatri圎mulator was designed to solve.) Because hardware is expensive and hard to source post-pandemic, the new version of the scoreboard was built with only a handful of matrix resolutions in mind, namely 32x32 and 64x32.
#Create a glyph tag how to#
Yet another interesting topic has arisen this week from the MLB LED Scoreboard project – delving into the almost 30-year-old BDF 2.2 font specification from 1993 to figure out how to add Unicode A4D8 (ꓘ) support for all fonts supported on the scoreboard.Īs mentioned in my previous post, a very generous community member merged in a massive refactor of the entire project after MLB (not-so-) suddenly deprecated the old data source the scoreboard previously consumed.
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