Is it possible to scroll chinese text on the scrolling layer?

1

I have a set of unicode fonts converted from .bdf to a .c file that includes chinese, japan or korea characters.
Does the smartmatrix have any functions or examples that can do scrolling those characters?

2

No there’s no examples for that. SmartMatrix Library does support adding custom fonts that are compatible with Adafruit_GFX:

And here’s a discussion about Chinese fonts and Adafruit_GFX:

3

The MultipleTextLayersGfx is really good example for scrolling text with custom fonts, but it seems not working for chinese fonts.
You can download the font source code kaiu16pt7b.h (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aJQuqMZLT4u_bQGDnVmHiPr0olgyw_Eg/view?usp=sharing) here.

The changes I did for testing is listed below, but only letters and digits scrolled on panel.

  1. Add the chinese font header.

#include “kaiu16pt7b.h”

  1. Modify the example source code with chinese characters.

scrollingLayer00.setFont(&kaiu16pt7b);
scrollingLayer01.setFont(&kaiu16pt7b);

if(scrollingLayer00.start(“中文 1”, -1) < 0)
Serial.println(“Layer 00 text doesn’t fit”);
if(scrollingLayer01.start(“中文 Layer 01”, -1) < 0)
Serial.println(“Layer 01 text doesn’t fit”);

Any suggestion?

Thank you a lot.

Hsu-Cheng

4

That font doesn’t contain Chinese characters. You can use this tool to see what’s in an Adafruit_GFX font:

https://tchapi.github.io/Adafruit-GFX-Font-Customiser/

Adafruit_GFX and SmartMatrix Library are built around ASCII characters which only support 128 characters. Even if you found an Adafruit_GFX font that contained Chinese characters you would likely have to modify Adafruit_GFX and SmartMatrix Library to be able to address each character, as you will likely have more than 128 characters.