RBF fonts

Download RBF fonts

Here are some free fonts which were converted into the RBF format and checked for correct character spacing. Feel free to add your own RBF fonts here.

Codepage Win1251

A small collection of common Windows UI fonts (rbf-fonts.zip; 40 Kb)

http://www.zshare.net/download/67291053f4e96dd7/

Codepage Win1252 - West European Latin

• Libsans bold 14,16,18,20 (Broken link)

Codepage Win1253 - Greek, Modern[1]

Get a collection of RBF menu and symbol fonts here(chdkfonts.zip - 0.18MB).

Tutorial: How to make RBF fonts

If you want to convert a truetype font into a RBF font which your camera understands, you need a converter. This turorial uses rbfEditor. Please note that this editor is only for the following codepages: Win1250 (East European Latin), Win1251 (Cyrillic), Win1252 (West European Latin).
Here is how you do it:

Download and install rbfEditor. Go to Service>Settings and choose the appropriate codepage for your language. Make a preview text file where you can easily see if the spaces between characters are even. You can, for example, make a "chartest.txt" and put the following text in there: "1234567890 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" and so on.	The rbfEditor
Go to File>Import and choose a true type font, a style and a size.
Now we could simply save this as a RBF font, but the import was not flawless. Some characters have larger spacings than other characters. See the characters "j", "y", "V" and "Y" in this example.
Double click a character to open it. Now we will see that the spacings are too large. Most characters in this example have 1 row of pixels left and right and 3 rows of pixels below. But this character has 2 pixel rows on the left and one row on the right too much. So we use the arrows left and right and the slider below to correct this. Repeat this step for the other characters which were not properly imported. Be careful: This tool has no undo function! Save your progress from time to time, since mistakes are easily made.
When you are satisfied save your RBF font. Give it a filename like Arial16b.rbf so you will easily remember that it is Arial, 16pt, bold. The filename may have 11 (8+3) characters. If it is longer, it won't be properly displayed in the file browser. Also remember which codepage your font is designed for.

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Symbol Fonts for Icon-Menus

Here's a couple of "symbol" (icon) fonts for the new menu system that is quickly becoming popular. The standard font size created by the author of this feature is 16pt. If you try to use this with any menu-fonts below 16pt the symbols simply do not show. Trying to create small legible symbols is difficult. In all honesty the 10pt one included here is almost useless. (Included in case anyone else can make it better.) It was originally designed as white on black but now that we can select our own colors for the symbol-font this reversal isn't necessary. The 11pt symbol font seems to be okay for use with smaller menu-fonts. It works extremely well with my favorite "msref11b.rbf" font. Using this font size I am able to have the full CHDK menus on my screen without having to scroll to make selections (in most cases). 12pt to 15pt symbol-fonts would be quite useful. It's just a matter of someone creating and submitting them. My experiment was to see how small I could make them and still be useful.

I changed a few of the standard (original 16pt) symbols to make them identifiable in these small sizes. The author's zebra-mode icon changed to zebra-stripes, the load-file icon to an open-folder icon, I put the camera lens on the correct side of the shutter button :), and the DOF icon was changed to a more universal DOF graphic (a diverging FOV showing 2 bars for the near/far DOF). If you don't like any of these feel free to change them with the RBF Font Editor. Feel free to also create the missing 12pt to 15pt (or larger?) symbol-fonts using these and the original author-created 16pt one for ideas when creating your own. Please submit them if you do.

I am uncertain why some of the symbols are where they are in these font files, and some appear to be as-yet unused in the new menu system, but I followed the lead of the originator of this very nice enhancement and tried to stay true to his symbol-font layout. (To copy one character to another place in the RBF Font Editor it's a simple matter of just clicking and dragging it, so duplicating them in other places is simple once the first one is designed.) The 10pt font was created by starting out with a 10pt font file. The 11pt font was created from scratch and does not include all the ASCII characters but still seems to work just fine. Using the RBF Font Editor you can change the whole font's width when starting from scratch but not if you are editing an old font. There's a plus to starting from scratch.

The wikia does not allow zip files to be uploaded, so I renamed this zip file to a pdf file. Rename "Symbol_10pt_11pt_fonts.pdf" to "Symbol_10pt_11pt_fonts.zip" and extract as usual. Symbol_10pt_11pt_fonts.pdf

I also included my favorite msref-bold 11pt menu-font to match/pair up with the 11pt symbol-font for testing purposes. When originally creating this menu-font the RBF editor didn't import some characters properly and there was some superfluous space above and to the right of each character. This has all been corrected, making for much more legible and much more compact on-screen menus. Less menu scrolling.