Attached is another image and sample scene.

Recently, there were discussions about outline fonts and turning text 
into 'functions' with gradient values suitable for isosurface use. With 
the latter I was reminded of a long dropped experiment for creating 
gradient images of text characters by projecting a parallel area light 
through the text{} object.

It happened too, in my yuqk rework of the text{} object I added 'open' 
and 'caps' capabilities to return only side surface intersections or cap 
/ end surface intersections.

Further, in the coming R19 release of yuqk, the text{} object supports a 
true zero thickness - which sets the inside test to return false and, if 
using 'caps', only the top cap surface intersections are returned. In 
other words, there is now a method to get true 2D text{} surfaces.

Though a very tiny thicknesses would work as light projected through 
text{}s for this outlined font method in official POV-Ray releases, 2D 
surfaces are ideal for the job.

Anyhow. A technique to turn any font into an outline font as seen in the 
image. The downside of the method is the final renders are slow.

Bill P.

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Attachments:
Download 'outlinefontmethod.png' (77 KB) Download 'outlinefontmethod.pov.txt' (3 KB)

Preview of image 'outlinefontmethod.png'