[OpenSCAD] 3D Text

[Clifford Wolf]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 11:27:09PM +0100, Marius Kintel wrote:
> The real solution for text would be to interface directly with freetype,
> or a higher-level library on top of that if we can find smth. useful.
> This is on the TODO list - we're just slighty short of developer
> resources :/

afaik freetype does not support rendering to a vector backend but always
generates pixel maps.

My current plan for this is the following:

1. implement an svgpath() statement that creates a 2d object from an svg
path (I probaly could reuse some code from [1] for this).

2. implement a function that can convert a string into an array of
characters.

3. write a simple perl/awk/whatever script that reads in an svg font
file (they look like [2]), extracts all <glyph> entities and spits out an
SCAD module that converts a string into a union of svgpath() statements.

non-monospace fonts would probably need some additional functions
(calculating sums using the entries from lists, etc) that would
probably be handy to have for many other cases too.

yours,
 - clifford

[1] http://svn.clifford.at/ecad4g/trunk/shapes/primitives.cc
[2] http://svn.clifford.at/ecad4g/trunk/modules/kernel/fonts/Mono.svg

-- 
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