Fonts as X,Y Coordinates??

[daltoncalford]

Hi All,

For those who have not picked up on what I am working on, I am creating a 3d space layout using isometric hexes.

Now that I have a layout, I need to put labels on the grid, but, the labels need to look isometric.
I have the math to convert x,y coordinates to isometric coordinates, but, now I need to get fonts as a set of X,Y positions.

Does anyone have anything like this?

Any and all help would be appreciated.

Best regards

Dalton

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi Dalton !

No answers so far ?

Youre going quite in details

Well, the kind of source for font paths may depends on the programming environment you actually use (which Do You use ?).
You may need to extract contours from TrueType or PostScript font data files. There are surely libs for that around in the web.

Maybe You could just use skew abilities of the textout functions to get a text, which would fit into an isometric environment.

Regards,

Mert

 

[daltoncalford]

Hi Mert,

I use a variety of environments, from SGI/IRIX, HP/UX, Sun/Solaris, Linux/BSD/MacOSX all the way down to windows when/if I have to.

I have not been in the graphic design area of programming for a LOOOOOOONG time (somewhere on the order of 14 years) and I do not have any font tools.

I know CC2 can extract font information, I will see if they have any way of giving me the information as x,y points.

If you know of a better way, please let me know.

best regards

Dalton

 

[tjoneslo]

http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/fonts/postscript-type-1-fonts.html

This contains a high level description of what is in a postscript font file. The Type 1 fonts contain a vector graphic description of what the font is supposed to look like, which is then rendered onto a bitmap display (which is why they look so good at any scale). The page also contains links to various tools for manipulating the fonts.

Were I confronted with this problem, I'd look very closely at the graphics engine I was using which renders the fonts. Many of them I know allow transforms, and transforming a flat into isometic projection is a simple transform (as you know).

 

[daltoncalford]

Hi Tjoneslo,

I am not using 'standard' isometric projections to create the grid. I have modified the three translation angles to be more visually appealing.

I am using a cad package to enter the points for the resultant font, manually.

I am limited as to the amount of low level control I have over the rendering of the fonts.

I am thinking of just entering each font as a symbol to be placed as needed onto my drawings.

Thanks for the link - I will look at it at lunch time.

best regards

Dalton

 

[inexorabletash]

You might want to start with the Hershey vector font. Start here:

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/other/hershey/

This is a very complete vector font made up of straight lines, with a very simple definition format.