problems with small fonts

[eadmaster]

When using a small font like TomThumb the first line gets printed outside the screen.
(i have to add 13 padding spaces before the string to be printed)

side question:
can i reduce the size of the whitespace between words and the newlines?
(actually the whitespace takes 5 pixels with my 3-pixel width font)

[pljakobs]

this has been sitting around for a long time.
The dimensions of a font are part of the font definition. So when you say your whitespace is five pixels wide, that's consistent with it's definition
{ 0, 0, 0, 4, 0, 1 }, // 0x20 '
if the following character has an xOffset of 1, that would make it five pixels.
Same goes for the actual height of the font:
they're all defined to be 3 pixels high, but some have an additional offset that would make them bigger.
For fonts that small, I assume that freetype just has issues rendering them onto a small cell without rounding errors. You can certainly go ahead and manually adapt those values, although I figure that would be a whole lot of work without a graphical editor that understands the GFXfont format (of which there's none).

As for why your String is showing outside the screen - you say "first line" but then say you need to pad with spaces - could it be that the first line is printed above the visible area? Keep in mind that the flexible fonts are not top left pixel bound but have a baseline that runs at the bottom of the characters with things like p,q, j and y reaching below it. So if you print someting to screen position (0,0) it would be expected that only the the character portions reaching below the baseline would show.

pj