OpenSCAD MakerBot Font Module
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Published on March 5, 2011
Derived from
OpenSCAD League Gothic Font Module
by avrgeek
Description
After seeing the great work of tbuser and avrgeek I was inspired to create an OpenSCAD module for the font used by MakerBot Industries.
The font itself is called Designer Block by K-Type (http://www.k-type.com/?p=296). It's free for personal use but K-Type require a paid license for commercial use. I've licensed this Thing under a non-commercial license to highlight this. If you own a license for the font then feel free to contact me for a relicensed version of this Thing that you can derive for commercial use.
I had hoped to extend avrgeek's code to provide proper support for variable-width fonts. Unfortunately the limitations in the OpenSCAD language hampered my efforts but the examples provided show how you can manually kern the text to get around this problem.
You'll see from the Character Test that some of the characters (G, H, T and ?) currently fail to render. This is apparently due to a winding direction problem I've yet to fix. For the MBI logo I've worked around it by carefully hacking a replacement T out of an I and a hypen. :)
If there is interest in better font support for OpenSCAD I might look into some of the scripting language interfaces that may be useful for generating OpenSCAD code that will properly kern the selected font. As it stands you might be better off just typing up the text in Inkscape and importing it into OpenSCAD as a DXF for linear extrusion.
I've included avrgeek's Customize.txt which contains basic instructions for porting new fonts.
I have yet to print anything using this font so I have no idea whether it will even work. :)
The font itself is called Designer Block by K-Type (http://www.k-type.com/?p=296). It's free for personal use but K-Type require a paid license for commercial use. I've licensed this Thing under a non-commercial license to highlight this. If you own a license for the font then feel free to contact me for a relicensed version of this Thing that you can derive for commercial use.
I had hoped to extend avrgeek's code to provide proper support for variable-width fonts. Unfortunately the limitations in the OpenSCAD language hampered my efforts but the examples provided show how you can manually kern the text to get around this problem.
You'll see from the Character Test that some of the characters (G, H, T and ?) currently fail to render. This is apparently due to a winding direction problem I've yet to fix. For the MBI logo I've worked around it by carefully hacking a replacement T out of an I and a hypen. :)
If there is interest in better font support for OpenSCAD I might look into some of the scripting language interfaces that may be useful for generating OpenSCAD code that will properly kern the selected font. As it stands you might be better off just typing up the text in Inkscape and importing it into OpenSCAD as a DXF for linear extrusion.
I've included avrgeek's Customize.txt which contains basic instructions for porting new fonts.
I have yet to print anything using this font so I have no idea whether it will even work. :)
Instructions
Extract the contents of OpenSCADFont-DesignerBlock.zip.
Launch OpenSCAD from the location of the extracted files.
Copy & paste the following into the code window:
Launch OpenSCAD from the location of the extracted files.
Copy & paste the following into the code window:
include <OpenScadFont.scad>
fnt_str(["H","e","l","l","o","","W","o","r","l","d","!"],12,1,5);
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avrgeek
on
March 5, 2011
said:
I like this font a lot. Your right that this type o work would be easier to do in Inkscape, convert to dxf, and extrude. But part of me really want a script-able solution to generating text in OpenSCAD. The language in OpenSCAD can be frustrating, especially to someone who's used to other programming environments.
License
OpenSCAD MakerBot Font Module by grokbeer is licensed under the Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share Alike license.
More from grokbeer
Hi! I fixed the variable-width problem!
http://www.thingiverse.com/thi...
I use a recursive function call to add the character widths (which eventually leads to stack overflows...) and a PHP script to convert the font from SVG to OpenSCAD paths.
Aaaand: OpenSCAD now supports accessing string using len(someString) and someString[charIndex]! :-D
Greetz!
Awesome, nice work!