POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Feature proposal Server Time
1 Jun 2024 21:14:27 EDT (-0400)
  Feature proposal (Message 1 to 3 of 3)  
From: Anthony D  Baye
Subject: Feature proposal
Date: 14 Jan 2015 19:25:08
Message: <web.54b7079ffe2d4c34bd92286f0@news.povray.org>
I remember reading somewhere that font files store characters as splines and I
was thinking that it would be fantastic to have text objects indexed as arrays
of splines...

What does everybody else think?

Regards,
A.D.B.


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From: clipka
Subject: Re: Feature proposal
Date: 14 Jan 2015 21:17:50
Message: <54b7234e$1@news.povray.org>
Am 15.01.2015 um 01:19 schrieb Anthony D. Baye:
> I remember reading somewhere that font files store characters as splines and I
> was thinking that it would be fantastic to have text objects indexed as arrays
> of splines...
>
> What does everybody else think?

That should certainly be possible.

Somewhat related, I've already been pondering to merge part of the text 
primitive implementation with that of the prism primitive; after all, 
both primitives implement extruded spline outlines, except that the text 
primitive's spline outlines are taken from a font file. This would leave 
the text primitive code stripped down to a module for extracting spline 
outlines from font files, which is exactly what your proposed feature 
would need as well.

Such a code change should also make it a good deal easier in the future 
to add support for other font formats, as such extensions wouldn't have 
to worry about the tracing part at all; for instance, the present text 
tracing code only supports quadratic spline outlines as used in 
TrueType, while some OpenType font variants would require support for 
cubic spline outlines; the prism primitive already supports those.


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From: Anthony D  Baye
Subject: Re: Feature proposal
Date: 15 Jan 2015 01:45:00
Message: <web.54b760d51876e588bd92286f0@news.povray.org>
clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 15.01.2015 um 01:19 schrieb Anthony D. Baye:
> > I remember reading somewhere that font files store characters as splines and I
> > was thinking that it would be fantastic to have text objects indexed as arrays
> > of splines...
> >
> > What does everybody else think?
>
> That should certainly be possible.
>
> Somewhat related, I've already been pondering to merge part of the text
> primitive implementation with that of the prism primitive; after all,
> both primitives implement extruded spline outlines, except that the text
> primitive's spline outlines are taken from a font file. This would leave
> the text primitive code stripped down to a module for extracting spline
> outlines from font files, which is exactly what your proposed feature
> would need as well.
>
> Such a code change should also make it a good deal easier in the future
> to add support for other font formats, as such extensions wouldn't have
> to worry about the tracing part at all; for instance, the present text
> tracing code only supports quadratic spline outlines as used in
> TrueType, while some OpenType font variants would require support for
> cubic spline outlines; the prism primitive already supports those.

I was thinking that it would be incredibly handy for animating text effects.
The thought came to me while I was working on some changes to my spraypaint
macro.

Regards,
A.D.B.


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