[GEM-dev] text on a spline... (and text3d feature requests)

[B. Bogart]

Hello all,

I'm about to start a project and wanted to ask on this list your ideas on how to 
approach it. I would like to get a dynamic string/symbol(with spaces) to be 
rendered with text3d as if it is following a spline. Where the baseline of each 
letter is a tangent to the spline curve. I'd like to be able to move the control 
points of this spline curve and change the text (including the number of 
letters) dynamically.

My first thought is to build a pmpd chain that will act as the "spline" then use 
tLia objects to control the position and rotation of individual letters (as 
separate text3d objects) Some issues are how to make a pmpd chain more like a 
spline, I guess having no flextion in the links? Spacing the letters could also 
be a challange.

Any other ideas of how to approach this? How intensive is the math for 
calculating the position of the letters based on some real spline-curve 
equation? Any examples how I may go about this method?

Any opions would be welcomed.

As for text3d in general It would be very very nice to be able to have support for:

* Text boxes that wrap the contents, by character, or by word, or with "-".
   A special line-break character{,sequence} would be nice too. You just define
   the bounding box for the text in gem units (or rows+columns) and it goes from
   there. Basically giving text3d the ability to manage multiple lines of text.

* Jusification within this box (left right centre flush)

* text following a spline? ;)

Thanks all!

Ben