Baseball is back in full swing, and has recently taken a stand with Major League Baseball, [Ty Porter] The MLB LED Scoreboard is warming up with a major contribution to the project – changing some 20-something old fonts to support baseball’s ‘ꓘ’ letter, a special strikeout called the Third Strike (meaning the batter didn’t swing).
The problem is that Major League Baseball-the-Entity has recently devalued the original data source for the scoreboard project. It called for a huge refactor in the codebase, including previously patched fonts that now show the default no-character font for fonts, or nothing at all.
Fortunately, BDF font files are fairly human-readable and generate references. bitmapWhich is a real bitmap in Hex. [Ty] Settled in Unicode A4D8 (ꓘ), Lisu is a character in the Tibetan-Burmese language that certainly looks good enough for this baseball fan. Then it becomes a matter of mirroring the bitmap for ‘K’. [Ty] Tried some things like flipping the nibbles and looking at each one on a table, but it also mirrors the padding, which is bad news.
He then tried not to reverse the nibbles and only saw them on a table, but this method was dropped and inadvertently added bits. Finally, he tried to reverse the sequence, saw the reverse nibble, and transferred each byte until padding. It works for most of the 20 fonts [Ty] patched others fell in line with some manual work.
Not a lot of baseball fans? You’re almost certain to like it, especially if you hate Mayo.