Anti-Aliased fonts, available now! (Kinda...)

One common complaint about Nextion is the horrible font rendering on the device which makes your UI look like 1980’s era technology. All fonts are monospaced and no anti-aliasing is available in the core editor, so the edges looks jaggy and generally of low quality.

This concern has been voiced on the official forums over and over, which of course is met with the standard insults from forum staff and dodging of the question. A while back the Nextion support staff decided on a new approach - they allegedly now can in fact offer anti-aliased fonts, but only if you pay them several hundred dollars per font per size, and the result cannot be redistributed in HMI form.

Meanwhile, TJC has released editor version 0.55 (Nextion is still stuck on 0.53). From the release notes:

  1. Full range of upgraded anti-aliased fonts (including font anti-aliasing, non-monospaced characters, character footprint extension)
  2. Upper editing interface Mouse drag and drop to change the size of the control by 6 ways (up drag height, left drag width, upper left corner drag && high, left lower corner drag && high, upper right corner drag && high, bottom right corner drag && high)
  3. Increase the lock function of the control (the mouse cannot drag the position of the control after locking)
  4. The project of the software startup interface opens the history and adds the right-click menu (allows deletion of the specified record or invalid record or all history)
  5. Increase the virtual floating point control
  6. Edit interface mouse select control to increase anti-shake algorithm
  7. Fix some small bugs in the new X series

The results of this are fantastic. Here is an example of one of my own projects, with the Nextion display on the left and the TJC display running 0.55 on the right:

The release also handles proportional fonts w/ kerning and hinting working like it should. I asked if this would be made available for Nextion users and my post was deleted.

Presumably, the Nextion support staff are making good money selling one-off fonts and are thus strongly incentivized to delay the release of a free tool which produces better results for as long as possible.

So that’s where it stands today as of this writing. Really nice looking anti-aliased and proportional fonts are available right now, but are being withheld by individuals within Nextion who just-so-happen to be making thousands of dollars by charging people to create those fonts for them.

As usual, TJC users get the best experience with the best support at half the price per device. Nextion gets the Nextion support team, ever ready to take your money, then take more money, and then insult you in the process.

This is a fun quote from the dear leader of the Nextion support team:

So, $125 per size, and then let’s add a $125 “motivate me” fee because FUCK YOU THAT’S WHY.

I downloaded the 0.55 release from the Chinese website and Defender detected Trojan:Win32/Spursint.F!cl. Not sure if this is a false positive or not, but I’m not taking the chance on my work computer.

That’s a good point I probably should have brought up - VirusTotal shows the installer as likely to be clean (1 hit out of 69), and the extracted executable comes back clean, but Windows Defender doesn’t like it. TJC is a legit outfit, I don’t expect any shenanigans from them but as always… proceed with caution.

Yes, I think it’s a false positive too. I checked the file hash on VirusTotal and that actually came back clean for all engines.

well i think it’s more what it tried to do afterwards i think it tries to use a hidden link to download or execute something else

I’ve scanned the install folder, nothing comes up. The installer extracts another executable (which is often how this stuff works), and that executable is what is triggering the alert. Again, TJC isn’t likely to want to be dropping viruses on their customer systems, so I don’t think it’s a legit issue, but again use caution. I ran the installer on a scrap VM, scanned the resulting install, then moved the installed folder over to my dev system.

yeah i installed the version you gave me and nothing came up ima get on to eset to have a look at it and if its a false positive fix it so it don’t get detected no more

Some additional observations after deeper review of the TJC editor:

  • The editor codebase is the same for both products. Both languages are cooked into the code, and it’s a simple function call to determine if the UI will be in English or Chinese
  • It’s becoming increasingly clear that TJC is running the show. The product is 100% TJC, from the firmware, editor software, and hardware perspective. Nextion licenses the product and sells for worldwide distribution under their name. The Nextion support staff will have you believe that they are somehow involved with development - they are lying.
  • There is an English-language Nextion 0.55 editor ready to go and presumably being tested. Test versions are available for download but I don’t think I can link it here. Anti-aliased fonts work, and no AV alerts are triggered.
  • There may be an avenue to get the TJC editor working in English, allowing one to use an English editor and flash to TJC panels (which, again, are 50% the price of the Nextion panels but otherwise identical)

It’s now possible to use the TJC editor in english, with TJC panels. More info here: HOWTO: Use TJC editor v0.55 for TJC panels in English

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I found a way to use Nextion panel with TJC editor 0.55, and i downloaded succesfully a project with the new anti-aliased font on it.

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Any details on this? Would you maybe have a chance to jump on our Discord and talk about the approach?

Have my Nextion now with AA on the run3d4a63f9-33ca-457d-a913-a932e2d461df
Here without 230c69de-8a57-4c52-83a6-9d499a3f4c2f

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H-Oo1sI91E

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Looks fantastic!
How did you do that?

if you want, write a PN to me

@bl00dh0und4
Great news. Well I can’t PN yet, but I’m interested in solution.


This is my little nextion project
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Looks nice. Is this interface with ODBII?

No it is over can-bus

:star_struck: WOW! That looks great @bl00dh0und4!

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