PM 2Ring wrote:

> John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> 
>>PM 2Ring wrote:
>>
>>>I've been playing with John VanSickle's old Alphabet Blocks include file
>>>
>>>http://www.erols.com/vansickl/povray.htm
>>
>>Ye goodness, that's an old post!  I haven't used that web site in over
>>five years.  I've updated my macros to make use of the new SDL features.
> 
> Good to hear! At least the old Web address let me know you were the author.
> What's your new Web address?

It turns out that while I updated my macros, I never got around to 
uploading the update to my new site.

> That code looks familiar. :) BTW, where do we find CutCylinder()?

Ach!  CutCylinder is found in my Thoroughly Useful Macros:

   http://enphilistor.50megs.com/macs.htm

> Also, is there any reason in particular that you dropped the ROT13 encoding
> on the back letter? I like ROT13. :)

Probably because the new macro accepts only one letter, and I was too 
lazy at the moment to write ROT13 code, and since most of the time only 
one side is visible, it doesn't matter much.

>>It still uses the timrom.ttf font, but I am sure that the interested
>>student could modify the macro to change it.
> 
> I'm sure they could. :) I've only been using horizontal centering, which
> seems to work ok with all the fonts I've tried, at least with most
> upper-case letters and numbers. Many lower-case letters & some punctuation
> marks do need vertical centering to fit onto the block face properly, but I
> didn't do this because then the letters don't line up properly in slabs of
> text.

I've noticed that real-world alphabet blocks have an upper case letter 
on one painted side, the ROT13 on the other side, the lower case 
versions letters burned into two of the four unpainted sides, and a 
picture of something starting with the two letters burned into the two 
remaining sides.  Sometimes the background of the painted sides is 
painted white.

When I updated the macro, I decided to make the color a user option, 
even though in a set of real-world blocks, a given letter usually has 
the same color throughout the set.  This was for artistic reasons, 
because if every 4th block has the same color, then A, E, I, M, N, R, V 
and Z will be colored the same in ROT13 blocks, and that results in too 
much of that color.

Regards,
John

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