Bitmap text renderer

[Charlie Brej]

On 12/10/09 16:24, Ray Strode wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Charlie Brej<plymouth at brej.org>  wrote:
>> Noticed some people were having problems wanting text messages before / is
>> mounted. How about a bitmap text renderer? I hacked one up. It is pretty
>> small (7kb compiled stripped).
> I pushed this to the bitmap-label-control branch here:
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/plymouth/log/?h=bitmap-label-control
>
> Did you write all those glyphs by hand?!  that must have taken time :-)

Actually I should have mentioned the copyright might be from the kernel. Just 
hexdumped and seded. I'll poke around find a license and a name to put on.

> I think this approach might be useful for some use cases, but it has a
> big drawback:
>
> 1) Still requires copying translations to the initrd
> 2) Doesn't have sufficient font converage to render strings in
> arbitrary languages.

Yeah, I just meant this to be a backup which usually doesn't get shown.

Ideally the best approach might be to pre-render using a tiny pango based text 
to png program, in the desired language, and put that in the initrd. Then if the 
pango plugin load fails, it looks in the prerendered directory for an image. Use 
a CRC of the text for the image filenames.

This is in the case of wanting to flash up "Press esc for details", passwrd for 
/ or swap...