Text Rendering Support

[cartesian-theatrics]

Any thoughts on adding text support? We could consider doing a fairly clean ripoff the OpenSCAD solution based on freetype2.

https://github.com/openscad/openscad/blob/8951c9bf04f4bd807fedc16a8c10d2c4dd4db047/src/core/FreetypeRenderer.cc

[pca006132]

I don't think this is considered core operation, but maybe we can add it to the js/python bindings?

[cartesian-theatrics]

Sounds good to me, except I kinda need it to be implemented in c++ and consumable as part of some shared library. Ideally the util library would be available as a build target. Are you saying the implementations would be in python/js?

[elalish]

I think the main thing is we have no desire to maintain font libraries here. Anything that generates a polygon can easily enough be used in our library - there are lots of existing libraries to turn fonts into polygons. It's generally easiest for us to consume them in JS/Python since C++ dependencies are always a pain. Have you looked for a C++ font library yet?

[cartesian-theatrics]

That's fair. I looked a little while back for a font -> polygons library. Didn't find anything that did only that but I'm sure it's out there somewhere. I'll take a look.

[pca006132]

Maybe there are font -> SVG, and then you are use the SVG -> polygon code in jscad.

[cartesian-theatrics]

Since I'm not consuming from JS I'm thinking if I can't find an existing impl I'll probably write a c++ lib that converts freetype glyphs to polygons.

[cartesian-theatrics]

Created a small library to support this:

https://github.com/SovereignShop/text-to-polygon

And was able to integrate it with Manifold without too much trouble. Could create an PR if you're interested.

https://github.com/elalish/manifold/compare/master...SovereignShop:manifold:text-support?expand=1

It's very minimal at the moment. The only dependency is freetype, which I'm able to pull with FetchContent.

[elalish]

Thanks! I don't think we want this is in the core library, as fonts have a tendency to balloon into large binaries. However, I'd welcome a PR with links and information to make it easy to integrate by other projects. It might also be nice to have in ManifoldCAD.org - do you want to build this into an npm module, or does such a thing already exist?