Text in openscad

[CarryTheWhat]

Hey -- I see MCAD is getting distributed with openSCAD now -- which is
fantastic news!! good work so far -- I'm working on a library I hope
to commit soon, hoping for eventual inclusion.

I noticed that openSCAD does not natively support text, which is
obviously super useful for customization, engraving, labeling, etc.

However I see see thingiverse user 'pipakin' has done the bulk of the
work:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:9551
https://github.com/pipakin/OpenSCAD-Font-Importer

Has this work been considered for inclusion in MCAD (and thus
distributed with standard OpenSCAD)? It seems like an obvious feature
that needs to be added to the package.

[christoph...@gmail.com]

(sorry if this is a duplicate message -- first time posting to this mailing list)

[Andrew Plumb]

I have a search() function waiting in the openscad pull request queue (see https://github.com/openscad/openscad/pull/90) that makes it easier to do generalized string-character, list-of-numbers and list-of-words mapping arrays.

See https://github.com/clothbot/openscad/blob/2e7a27f64416b3bb5b8e0a5d2969292cbacde7b6/testdata/scad/misc/search-tests.scad for simple function usage examples.

See https://github.com/clothbot/openscad/blob/2e7a27f64416b3bb5b8e0a5d2969292cbacde7b6/testdata/scad/features/text-search-test.scad that makes use of the "MCAD/fonts.scad" example waiting in the openscad/MCAD pull request queue:  https://github.com/clothbot/MCAD/blob/adb5b656553a10bb732255f3073ddd72453a5b5b/fonts.scad

Scroll down in https://github.com/openscad/openscad/pull/90/files to see the resulting test output png files.

...It's not a substitute for proper Free/TrueType Font text rendering, but it does open up some options for text-mapped objects.  When I have some free time I want to add at least a braille alphabet to MCAD/fonts.scad

Andrew.

--

"The future is already here.  It's just not very evenly distributed" -- William Gibson

Me: http://clothbot.com/wiki/