hexfont

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Included hex font files
• Examples
• License

Please note this README is best viewed elsewhere than github.com. github.com's default line-height setting causes distracting extraneous horizontal lines to appear when "printing" bitmaps and github.com does not allow using CSS to set a more reasonable line-height value.

Overview

This is an R data package that includes most "hex" font files from the GNU Unifont project compressed by xz. It includes a convenience function that loads several of them as a {bittermelon} bm_font() object. GNU Unifont is a duospaced bitmap font (8x16 and 16x16 glyphs) that pretty much covers all of the official Unicode glyphs plus several of the artificial scripts in the (Under-)ConScript Unicode Registry.

Included hex font files

{hexfont} includes most of the hex font files included in the GNU Unifont source code distribution. The version number is stripped from the file names in the precompiled directory and the hex fonts are all compressed by xz but other than that the hex fonts are otherwise unchanged. Due to CRAN size limitations we omit the "precompiled" unifont_all hex file (this is presumably the concatenation of the "precompiled" unifont and unifont_upper hex files).

hex_dir <- system.file("font", package = "hexfont")
list.files(hex_dir, pattern = ".hex.xz", recursive = TRUE)

##  [1] "plane00/alt/codepage-437.hex.xz"           
##  [2] "plane00/alt/izmg16-plane00-FFxx.hex.xz"    
##  [3] "plane00/alt/mongolian-vertical.hex.xz"     
##  [4] "plane00/alt/phags-pa-vertical.hex.xz"      
##  [5] "plane00/alt/quad-width.hex.xz"             
##  [6] "plane00/alt/reiwa-vertical.hex.xz"         
##  [7] "plane00/alt/uni0009-orig.hex.xz"           
##  [8] "plane00/copyleft.hex.xz"                   
##  [9] "plane00/custom00.hex.xz"                   
## [10] "plane00/hangul-syllables.hex.xz"           
## [11] "plane00/izmg16-plane00.hex.xz"             
## [12] "plane00/omit.hex.xz"                       
## [13] "plane00/plane00-nonprinting.hex.xz"        
## [14] "plane00/plane00-unassigned.hex.xz"         
## [15] "plane00/pua.hex.xz"                        
## [16] "plane00/spaces.hex.xz"                     
## [17] "plane00/unifont-base.hex.xz"               
## [18] "plane00/wqy.hex.xz"                        
## [19] "plane00csur/plane00csur-nonprinting.hex.xz"
## [20] "plane00csur/plane00csur-spaces.hex.xz"     
## [21] "plane00csur/plane00csur-unassigned.hex.xz" 
## [22] "plane00csur/plane00csur.hex.xz"            
## [23] "plane01/plane01-nonprinting.hex.xz"        
## [24] "plane01/plane01-noscript.hex.xz"           
## [25] "plane01/plane01-space.hex.xz"              
## [26] "plane01/plane01-unassigned.hex.xz"         
## [27] "plane01/plane01.hex.xz"                    
## [28] "plane01/space.hex.xz"                      
## [29] "plane02/izmg16-plane02.hex.xz"             
## [30] "plane02/zh-plane02.hex.xz"                 
## [31] "plane03/jp-plane03.hex.xz"                 
## [32] "plane03/zh-plane03.hex.xz"                 
## [33] "plane0E/plane0E-nonprinting.hex.xz"        
## [34] "plane0E/plane0E-unassigned.hex.xz"         
## [35] "plane0E/plane0E.hex.xz"                    
## [36] "plane0Fcsur/plane0Fcsur-nonprinting.hex.xz"
## [37] "plane0Fcsur/plane0Fcsur.hex.xz"            
## [38] "precompiled/unifont_jp_sample.hex.xz"      
## [39] "precompiled/unifont_jp.hex.xz"             
## [40] "precompiled/unifont_sample.hex.xz"         
## [41] "precompiled/unifont_upper_sample.hex.xz"   
## [42] "precompiled/unifont_upper.hex.xz"          
## [43] "precompiled/unifont.hex.xz"

Examples

The main function unifont() loads in several GNU Unifont hex files at the same time as a {bittermelon} bm_font() object. Arguments:

library("bittermelon")
library("hexfont")
system.time(font <- unifont(cache = FALSE)) # Unifont is a **big** font

##    user  system elapsed 
## 147.807   0.190 148.030

length(font) |> prettyNum(big.mark = ",") # number of glyphs

## [1] "125,472"

object.size(font) |> format(units = "MB") # memory used

## [1] "198.7 Mb"

# Faster to load from a cache
system.time(font <- unifont(cache = TRUE))

##    user  system elapsed 
##   0.758   0.000   0.758

# Or just load the subset of GNU Unifont you need
s <- "Ｒ很棒！"
system.time(font_s <- unifont(ucp = str2ucp(s)))

##    user  system elapsed 
##   0.740   0.000   0.739

# Mandarin Chinese
as_bm_bitmap(s, font = font_s) |>
    bm_compress("v")

##                     █ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄      █      █                     
##    ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄        ▄▀  █     █      █  ▀▀▀▀█▀▀▀▀      ▄█▄        
##     █     ▀▄     ▀  █ █▀▀▀▀▀█   ▀▀▀█▀▀ ▀▀█▀▀▀▀       ███        
##     █     ▄▀      ▄█  █▄▄▄▄▄█     ██▄ ▀▀█▀▀▀█▀▀      ▀█▀        
##     █▀▀▀█▀      ▄▀ █  █  █  ▄▀   █ █ ▀▄▀  █  ▀▄       █         
##     █    ▀▄        █  █   █▀    ▀  █    ▀▀█▀▀                   
##    ▄█▄    ▄█▄      █  █ ▄  ▀▄      █  ▀▀▀▀█▀▀▀▀       █         
##                    █  █▀     ▀▀    █      █

# Emoji
as_bm_bitmap("