Fontconverter not backward compatible ?

[SBACO]

I am using Touchgfx 4.13.0 in my application for a while and decide to upgrade to 4.17.0 (about time you can say). But it seems that the font management evolved, and as my product is upgradable OTA, I cannot really afford to resend all fonts in bluetooth low energy. Is there a way to configure the fontconverter to have an output compatible with previous version ?

I try to get the old one back in the latest touchgfx, but there are not compatible. Hope you can help.

It does not seems so, but does the other tools evolved ? textconverter or imageconverter will have the same issue ?

regards,

[SBACO]

To be more precise, it seems that the ordmasculine and ordfeminine caractere are not converted the same way (unicode 0x00AA and 0x00BA). The values are different, but more important the size is different, which make all the external memory mapping failed.

[SBACO]

Anybody ?

[SBACO]

Hello, I am sorry for pushing but can anyone confirm the issue and maybe expose a possible workaround ?

[Romain DIELEMAN]

Hi,

You need to make clean and make assets when you update to another version. Could you be more specific on the issues you face ? The FW team does not recall doing changes to the fontconverter, the textconverter got updated for sure however.

/Romain

[SBACO]

Hi Romain,

Thanks for taking time to help me.

The generated files for the fonts, for the same application in the latest version of touchgfx are different. For example, I take this file in my project and extract the 0x00AA character in it. You have the full generated file for both version enclosed.

Old touchgfx (4.13)

Font_hk_grotesk_bold_14_4bpp_0.cpp

   // Unicode: [0x00AA, ordfeminine]

   0xD4, 0x7D, 0x00, 0x46, 0xE1, 0x01, 0xD7, 0xFE, 0x03, 0x4E, 0xE3, 0x03, 0xE7, 0xBC, 0x03,

New touchgfx (4.17)

Font_hk_grotesk_bold_14_4bpp_0.cpp

   // Unicode: [0x00AA, ordfeminine]

   0xA3, 0x5B, 0x00, 0x67, 0xE3, 0x01, 0xC6, 0xFD, 0x03, 0x5E, 0xE2, 0x03, 0xE9, 0xDD, 0x03, 0x10,

   0x10, 0x00,

And to better understand why this is a problem in our case, it is because the fonts code is place in external flash memory and is not part of our updates (too heavy). So the few more bytes make the update just impossible for us, it means we need to include all fonts in next release if we want to update touchgfx.

[SBACO]

With the same file, generated with touchgfx 4.17. Only 3 differences in it (format of declaration line but do not care) and then characters 0x00AA et 0x00BA.

[SBACO]

@Romain DIELEMAN​ Do you need more information to understand the issue I am facing ?

[SBACO]

Hello, I am sorry for pushing again, but not able to fix the issue without your support.

regards

[SBACO]

Anybody ?

[Romain DIELEMAN]

Hi,

​

I havn't forgotten you but cannot help you personally, I need the help of the FW team but we have been under a lot of work the past weeks so your case has been put back in the backlog everytime. I believe we should be more available by the end of next week where I'll try to have them look deeper at your case (not promising a fix though :grinning_face_with_sweat:)

/Romain

[SBACO]

Hello @Romain DIELEMAN​ ,

Any chance that you manage to test the pending point I am facing ? any chance to get a fix or a workaround ?

Regards,

[Romain DIELEMAN]

Hi,

So what I have been replied is that it is too complicated to fix but we can help you try to adapt it. A solution would be to extract the generated file from 4.13 and modify it to have the lookup table use it.

By the way what is the purpose of upgrading to TouchGFX 4.17 ? Is it to use a widget that was added later on for example ? We could always try to extract that widget to make it work with 4.13.

/Romain

[SBACO]

But I do think that it is not that easy. The generated file manual modification does not seems like a good idea. Especially, not futur proof.

I do think that using latest version of your framework is always a good idea. You do bug fixing, optimization, adding feature, we cannot be stuck to one version... I am not sure to understand why the fix is so complicated, as the fontconverter is not supposed to have changes. But if I use the old one (from 4.13) with touchgfx 4.17, it does not work. this probably means that the manual modification of generated files won't work neither.