William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> On 4/5/23 06:34, Bald Eagle wrote:
> > Now that you've stuck your head deep into the glyph-handling code, how difficult
> > would you say it would be to write code in SDL that would take a font file and
> > create splines and/or prisms?
>
> That is what text{} does - more or less. You just don't see the result
> is a union of a bunch of prisms (one per character) - where 'nested'
> splines making up a character have been flattened.
>
> >
> > Or make the internal conversion exposed to SDL so that the result could be
> > written to a file?
>
> I thought about capturing the result too, and as a complete code hack,
> not too bad to do.
>
> Really supporting such a thing in SDL, much harder for sure. I doubt
> worth it, but not thought much about performance differences, for example.

I was sort of thinking about this as an infrequently used tool to export the
splines/prisms to an include file.

Currently, Cousin Ricky and I have resorted to using spreadsheets to convert
font files to splines.  If the extant source code could be easily "fixed" to
remove any C/C++ tricky coding stuff, then I'm sure the rest of us could take it
from there and convert the rest of the C/C++ syntax to SDL to make a nice
include file that could take a font filename as an argument and write out a
series of objects as splines and prisms.

I also look at things like that as a great instructional/learning tool for
people to understand how things happen under the hood, and maybe enough dots get
connected where we have people want to step up to do development work.

(Also, IIRC, since the STL file format is virtually a clone of POV-Ray's
mesh/triangle syntax, it would be fantastic if that geometry could be read from
the file directly without conversion.  Even if it were an experimental feature
that didn't do everything perfectly, it would still be a start, and a handy tool
for importing those kinds of meshes into scenes.)

- BW

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