Uneven Curves from Font outlines

Hello Forum,

sorry if this has allready been covered, I couldn't find something in this forum.

I'm trying to create font outlines in grasshopper 0.9.0067 whith rhino 5 SR7 64-bit for milling, using TextOutlines.gh

(also tried txt2crv.gh, txtLine-0.8.61.ghx and some other).

The curves that I retrieve in the grasshopper display or after baking are not smooth but somehow uneven. See the pictuere below (Font: Verdana), the black letter is the grasshopper-baked one, the blueone is created by rhino "TextObject"-command, whitch gives me smooth, nice looking curves.

(Same thing or worse with other fonts, much worse with bold letters.)

If I use the rhino "Text"-command and explode, the curves are exactly looking like the grasshopper- (textoutlines.gh-) curves, uneven, containing kinks.

Is there a way to create font outlines in grasshopper using the same method as in Rhino "TextObject"?

Thanks for any hints

Ferry

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on January 27, 2014 at 6:01am

Hi Ferry,

this is a tricky problem. Fonts are typically defined using Bezier curves, however when they are rendered to the screen the curvature is approximated by a list of line segments as that vastly speeds up display. It's conversely quite easy to get at this polyline data, however extracting the bezier data means actually parsing the Font file data. I do not know how to do this correctly.

XaraX (the vector software I use for making icons) can do this, I assume Illustrator can do it too. Perhaps you can use those applications to extract the bezier data from a set of characters?

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by Ferry59 on January 27, 2014 at 9:44am

Hi David,

With gh I'm reading dozends of lines from a txt-file (TextOutlines.gh), split them with Text-Split, convert them to curves, arrange them, rotate data-brances, offset for milling (witch is working fine since the direction of the inner form-curves of the characters AB8DO ... is reversed to the outer shapes).

Since rhino creates correctly shaped curves with "TextObject" there is no need to try out other software, i think. I was just wondering if there were an equivalent function in gh that can process multiple lines of text as well.

I was not evan sure if this error wasnt caused by my system.

Anyway, thanks to your answer, maybe I have to reference single Rhino-Textobject-curves into gh and try to do the arrangements with them.

Ferry

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