# "Additional fonts" available to HME on Premiere



## davidblackledge (Sep 9, 2008)

The story begins: I was wandering around the Premiere interface trying to remember where some setting was hidden when I ended up in Closed Captioning. I noticed it had a lot of font choices available for captions including Cursive and Serif and Monospace. The first two fonts were named "default" and "system"... the same as the only two fonts built in for HME. Brainstorm! I hacked up an Application class to let me access all the ostensible system font resource IDs (10-19 since 10 is "default.ttf," 11 is "system.ttf," and 20 is a sound id). 
The hope: make all those closed captioning fonts available in HME... or at least SOMETHING other than the two built-in sans-serif proportional fonts.

Launched an app to show text in each of those possible fonts and voila... 3 "additional fonts!"

It all goes downhill from here. 

Oddly enough, id 12 is invalid, but 13, 14, and 15 are valid fonts (and 16-19 aren't).
"13.ttf", on close inspection, has the same "strokes" as "system.ttf", while having the same "width" as "default.ttf", with slightly taller ascenders.
That is to say, "13.ttf" has a "1" with no bottom line, a g that looks like an upside down 6 (vs. the squished 8 style), and a "J" with a longer upstroke - all the same as "system.ttf" and different from "default.ttf." However, "system.ttf" has really fat characters, while "13.ttf" and "default.ttf" are similarly thin.

In other words, no real value to it... you have to look really hard to see the difference between "default.ttf" and "13.ttf"

Then we come to 14 and 15. Of all things, they are pre-italicized and pre-bolded versions of 13.
The only useful thing you get out of that is you can still apply italic and bold styles to them, so you can effectively get two degrees of angling and two degrees of thickening vs. 13.

The final blow: they don't exist on my TiVo HD, just my Premiere.

I had so hoped this would be the answer to one of Enter Webz' prayers :/
Oh well... it was a fun little adventure.

Maybe somebody wants to search for possible new built-in sound IDs using pyHME? Too much work to hack that one in the Java SDK.


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

Interesting. But, it's also supposed to be possible to specify an arbitrary TTF font to pass to the TiVo via HME. I put the code into HME for Python (the TTF class), but I don't recall that I've ever actually tried it.


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## davidblackledge (Sep 9, 2008)

Yeah, but that's yet another data transfer ... the thing I'm trying to minimize in Enter Webz... maybe if it can be done with a URL instead of a direct transfer? I have plans to maybe make it an option for a better experience, but not upload the fonts by default... something like that.


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

davidblackledge said:


> Maybe somebody wants to search for possible new built-in sound IDs using pyHME? Too much work to hack that one in the Java SDK.


Program:


```
NOTICE = """Up, Reverse or Replay to go back
Pause or Left to exit
Any other button to advance and play"""

import hme

class Snd(hme.Application):
    def startup(self):
        self.snd = 20
        self.root.set_text(NOTICE)

    def next_snd(self):
        self.root.set_text(self.snd)
        self.sound(self.snd)
        self.snd += 1

    def handle_key_press(self, key, rawcode):
        if key in (hme.KEY_LEFT, hme.KEY_PAUSE):
            self.active = False
        else:
            if key in (hme.KEY_UP, hme.KEY_REVERSE, hme.KEY_REPLAY):
                self.snd -= 2
            self.next_snd()
```
Result:

I found one new sound, at 37. (It sounds like the next in the speedup1..3 sequence, so I'm labelling it "speedup4" for the next version of HME for Python.)


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## davidblackledge (Sep 9, 2008)

wmcbrine said:


> I found one new sound, at 37. (It sounds like the next in the speedup1..3 sequence, so I'm labelling it "speedup4" for the next version of HME for Python.)


Neat! did you by any chance check it on a non-premiere, too?


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

davidblackledge said:


> Neat! did you by any chance check it on a non-premiere, too?


Does nothing on Series 2 or 3.


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## davidblackledge (Sep 9, 2008)

Just to complete the saga, I ran a test app on my Roamio yesterday to try using every reserved resource ID (from 1 to 2047). 
The ones we found were the only new ones that didn't produce a "doesn't exist" type of error. 
... and 1, documented as "this application" causes the TiVo to reboot when you put it in a view ;]


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