It looks like I am going to have to use my own bitmap font format. However it will be using a standard 256 color bmp file for the glyphs and an XML file for explaining the glyphs in the bitmap file. These could be easily put in a zip container and when I add zip support to Screens, Screens will able to use the font directly from within the zip file.
Although I don’t yet deal with 256 color bitmaps, rather only 24bit, I will add support for 256 color bitmaps soon for the font.
For now, I am writing the XML component which is very basic and is designed for quickly reading tags & attributes as objects without much verification at all. The font component then reads the XML and makes sense of it.
I added support for caching small files and the ability to access them in a read-only cache without the overhead of having to manually allocate a buffer and read bytes in bit by bit. If the entire file cannot be allocated in memory, you cannot use the read-only cache.
I don't believe how Screens is moving along. A few of you that have tested the versions have given me feed back... thanks!
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