"Leroy" <whe### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> "Chris R" <car### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> > William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> > >
> > > Only tricky part is figuring out the base character size and spacing.
> > > I've not found an easy and reliable way to do that as yet. I got to the
> > > above values by trial and error.
> > >
> > > Used box characters for the rectangular frame using the strings:
> > > "┌─────────┐",
"└───&#9
47
> 2;
> > ─────┘" and
"│││││││││&#9
47
> 4;
> > │││││",
> > >
> > > Bill P.
> >
> > If you are using a mono-type font, this worked for me:
> >
> > #local _t1 = text { ttf "fontname.ttf" "A" 1.0, 0 }
> > #local _t2 = text { ttf "fontname.ttf" "AA" 1.0, 0 }
> > #local _t1sz = max_extent(_t1) - min_extent(_t1);
> > #local _t2sz = max_extent(_t2) - min_extent(_t2);
> > #local _unit_width = (_t2sz - _t1sz).x;
> >
> > text { ttf "fontname.ttf" "What the heck?" 1.0, -2*unit_width*x }
> > text { ttf "fontname.ttf" "What the heck?" 1.0, <-unit_width, -1, 0> translate
> > <0, 14, 0> }
> >
> > -- Chris R
>
> I remember this little trick. But I didn't want to be limited to  mono-type
> fonts so I wrote a macro that cut a string into pieces and place each letter
> separately. And promptly forgot about it.

Aah!  In the meantime, I went down a rabbit hole and essentially did the same
thing...

See: https://github.com/carath63/povlibrary
library/libtext.inc
Examples/text_test.pov

Here is an example of using that technique to lay out text around a cylinder, up
a helix, and following a spline.  The spline relies on how close your the
distance between letters lines up with the distance between spline points.  As
you can see, it didn't work very well once the letters moved around the front
curve of the spline.  Still trying to figure out how to fix that.

-- Chris R

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