FPV Fonts in general
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Fonts, for the purposes of FPV, are compromised of monospaced glyphs. These glyph can represent numbers, letters and/or pictorial information. Glyphs are conceptually ordered in groups of 256 glyphs, referenced as 'pages'. As flight controller (FC) functions have increased over time, so has the number glyphs, and therefore pages, to allow the OSD to support those functions as needed. As of authoring this document there are 1, 2 and 4 page fonts.
Historically, analogue video systems used the flight controller (FC), or a purpose built OSD addon device, to embed the OSD onto the camera stream before it reached the VTX for sending. The look and feel of the analogue OSD is fully managed at the FC end, including analogue fonts. Analogue fonts are uploaded to the OSD chip on the FC for embedding the OSD in the video stream prior to transmission.
Modern HD digital video systems use a protocol standard called to send OSD data from the flying craft to the ground receiving end along side video information. More accurately, from the flight controller (FC) via the video transmitter (VTX) to the video receiver (VRX) system (goggles or stand alone VRX). HD digital fonts are stored at the VRX end and it is the responsibility of the VRX to interpret the MSP Displayport data and overlay the OSD information onto the video stream prior to display using the HD digital font. It is also of note that user selectable HD video resolutions require font files suited to that video resolution. OSD element positions remain the responsibility of the FC configurator to define and save to the FC.
Complicating the above, each FC firmware (FW), that supports different functions and features of FCs is different. Common FC firmware flavours are , & . These FC FW flavours and many more, can and do, have their own locations for individual functions their FC FW provides for individual or collections of glyphs, within the font.
What the above means is that there is no current single font that supports all FC FW needs. Therefore each FC FW requires specifically formatted font files for different video transmission resolutions.
