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

[chris clepper]

On Apr 6, 2004, at 12:56 PM, B. Bogart wrote:
>
> 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?

How about the spline_path object inside a [until] loop?  You could have 
arrays for translation, rotation and the text (not entirely sure how to 
do the latter).  Each master GEM tick would trigger the repeat which 
would run through the spline path and put the letter in the right spot. 
  I just whipped up a basic patch based on the spline_path example in 
02.advanced that you can find at the end of this mail.  You need to use 
the .tab files in examples/data/ for it to work.

> 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)

I think these can be done in abstractions for the most part, or at the 
very least an attempt should be made to do them that way.  That's 
really the way Pd was designed you know. ;)

> * text following a spline? ;)

This starts getting into the question of what Pd/GEM is really 'good' 
at doing.  I don't think really precise splined text is something GEM 
is particularly suited to doing.  For one thing the user interface for 
defining the spline would be what?  The array object doesn't really 
give you enough response for information, functionality and performance 
to be all that useful (it needs to at least need to give coordinate 
info about which element you are acting on).  So that leaves something 
like entering in lines of text into a file or trying to algorithmically 
fill an array at runtime.  The latter is potentially interesting while 
the former just seems like a royal pain in the ass.

cgc

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#X msg 461 55 0;
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#X obj 421 254 spline_path 3 array2;
#X obj 350 351 translate 1 0 0 0;
#X obj 464 320 spline_path 3 array3;
#X obj 421 98 metro 2000;
#X text 109 29 this demonstrates the spline_path object;
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#X msg 28 380 \; array2 resize 18 \; array2 read ../data/valcolor.tab
\; array3 resize 24 \; array3 read ../data/valmotion.tab;
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#X obj 68 86 loadbang;
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#X obj 350 189 until;
#X obj 354 122 gemhead;
#X msg 354 163 31;
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