New fonts

Discussion around the SwissMicros DM42 calculator
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newbrain
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Aug 26, 2021 9:18 am

New fonts

Post by newbrain »

I just received my DM42 and I'm really happy to see it matches and surpasses my expectations in build quality and ease of use, kudos to SM (and Thomas Okken, of course)!

Since it had an oldish FW on it, first thing I did was bringing it up to the latest available: DMCP 3.22 + DM42 3.19 (split update).

I have noticed a couple of things about the fonts:
  • The 0 (zero) character is now slashed rather than dotted as in most of the online material.
  • Using Shift-F5 a third font is available: it's not mentioned in the manual, and looks like a heavier stroke (bold) version of the non-HP one.
Now this third font (which I prefer, as my eyesight is not what it used to be) comes only in two sizes, probably dictated by flash space constraints as I imagine fonts are bitmapped; I would gladly have limited sizes in the lighter one.

Also, I really love dotted zeros: my go-to fonts for code editing are JetBrains Mono and Source Code Pro.

Form a quick look in the GitHub repo, it would seem the only way to achieve this font change is directly patching the closed source DMCP binary.
This might prove to be note really straightforward - I would imagine there's an hash or checksum in the image to make sure it's not corrupted before flash - I'm not afraid of a little assembly code, but I have no real intention to reverse engineer it.

Maybe I'm wrong and an easier method is available. Is there any way to customize them?
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giubin
Posts: 36
Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2021 5:57 pm
Location: Italy

Re: New fonts

Post by giubin »

I also like the dotted zero font. Following.
SwissMicros DM42
SwissMicros DM16L
HP 50g
HP 48GX
HP Prime G2
TI-89
TI-Nspire CX-II CAS
Sharp EL-506P; EL-512; EL-5020; EL-5120; PC-1360
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