Are there good, efficient font geometries available?

Sorry for asking, but does anyone have ILD files for all or most of the ASCII character set? I'd like good, efficient font geometries so I can render text with a few laser projectors.

I'm writing an app in Rust to display a live Twitter feed for New Year's. It'll be open source, so you guys can have it when I'm done. :)

I'm not sure how much text I can render without flicker, but I'm going to do my best with three projectors. I might have to set it to scroll. I'll be sure to post some videos, too.

Hershey Fonts...

you can get past the flickering problem by scrolling your text. it looks nice when you use intensity envelopes on either side of the displayed text so it fades on and fades out

Quote:

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Originally Posted by echelon

Sorry for asking, but does anyone have ILD files for all or most of the ASCII character set? I'd like good, efficient font geometries so I can render text with a few laser projectors.

I'm writing an app in Rust to display a live Twitter feed for New Year's. It'll be open source, so you guys can have it when I'm done. :)

I'm not sure how much text I can render without flicker, but I'm going to do my best with three projectors. I might have to set it to scroll. I'll be sure to post some videos, too.

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Laserboy comes with an ilda file with font characters.

Edit: this can do it in a way but the results are either point heavy or crap and point heavy. https://github.com/colouredmirrorball/Ilda
Use this example: https://github.com/colouredmirrorbal...CreateText.pde

LaserBoy is also open source so you can use these fonts as long as you sight the source.

http://laserboy.org/forum/index.php?...sg6398#msg6398
http://laserboy.org/forum/index.php?topic=557.0

The single stroke fonts are about the fewest points you can use to get text you can read.


James.

swamidog, what do you mean by "intensity envelopes"? Is this a term used in a commercial software package, like Pangolin? What does that effect look like? It sounds really cool! :)

mixedgas, http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/hershey/ is pretty awesome! Thanks! (Also, were you at this year's SELEM?)

colouredmirrorball, thanks for linking your source! I'm going to follow you on Github. I'm definitely looking forward to collaborators on projects in the future. Maybe we can hack on something together someday?

james, if I make a Rust crate with laser fonts, are your fonts suitable to include? (Are they BSD license compatible? I tend to release my software under the BSD 4-clause.)

I know the single stroke font you posted isn't open source or public domain, but I might be interested in buying/licensing it for my own private use if I can't get the other fonts working well enough. Something with few points like this is definitely ideal. How do I go about purchasing a license from you?

This is all awesome info! Thanks! :D

... I'm using all sorts and types of fonts for laser-engraving by exporting them from the original program (mostly CorelDraw) as HPGL and reimporting them in my Pronterface-variant "gieCAPS".

Depending on the source and export settings this are singlestroke or contoured fonts, outlined only or hatch-filled.

Do you need the vector lines only or have they to be optimized/recalculated for even segmentation?

Viktor

Quote:

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Originally Posted by echelon

james, if I make a Rust crate with laser fonts, are your fonts suitable to include? (Are they BSD license compatible? I tend to release my software under the BSD 4-clause.)

I know the single stroke font you posted isn't open source or public domain, but I might be interested in buying/licensing it for my own private use if I can't get the other fonts working well enough. Something with few points like this is definitely ideal. How do I go about purchasing a license from you?

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It's all under GPL3. I never sold any copies of the single stroke fonts, so I just included them in the LB distribution. I manually traced every glyph. It took a while. Anyway... you can use it if you want.

One thing to note about all of the LB fonts is that they use lit black lines to bond the segments. This is so that LB sees the whole glyph as one lit segment. If you want blanking between the lit segments you need to open the whole font set in LB and convert the lit black to blank in all frames and save it.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

If you do a little digging NASA, NTIS, and DOD DTIC have publications containing the complete Hershey fonts with the raw vector data enclosed.
You may find that a little more to your liking.
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https://emergent.unpythonic.net/software/hershey
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The Intensity shading is a effect in both Pango and LSX (different names, different function call), Applied Horizontal across the image it would be "dimmest, dimmer, dim bright bright bright dim, dimmer, dimmest", in either a linear or non-linear gradient, depending on the settings.
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Depth shading and gradient shading are old vector display tricks for cleaning up deficiencies in scan rate. Other tricks include shrinking the image size or brightness the further back down the "Z" axis you go.
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No, I had a professional commitment this year at the time of SELEM, Next year probably..
Steve

True type fonts aren't really that efficient for laser display. The closest to a single line true type font is STICK40