text. in paper. flat. cut.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010For making my genomes into paper cuts, I first had to make a tool that would take the text/data and arrange it in an archimedian spiral.
After running the text through a basic parser and adding headers for identification, I wound up with a script that would kick out PDF’s pretty fast. Then I realized that all of my letters were bitmapped. Duh! (and ugh…how typical!)
In order to get processing to deal with type as vectors, you need to use (in OPENGL) the createFont(); method and the textMode(SHAPE); method. It seems to prefer a certain type of ttf, but I haven’t been able to find any documentation on why it ignores certain types of fonts. Processing doesn’t handle type very well (its excruciatingly slow) when handling text as vectors, but with the screen render turned off it was acceptable. So I got some pdf’s with vector type.
1st go with ttf font in vector format.
Of course, using the laser cutter requires some unique approaches to type. One option, stencil fonts, works fairly well given the right material and scale. The letters need to be cut fairly large (over 1/4” at least), in order for the double line of the letter form to not burn the substrate or just cause the interior to fall out.
For this project I wanted the letters to be as delicate and as thin as possible and still form a negative space, so the idea of using single line fonts seemed attractive. True type fonts are “outline” fonts by nature, so apparently there is no such thing as a single line true type font. All lines must be closed loops, regardless of how they may appear on screen.
So in order to circumvent using a font at all and still get vector data out that LOOKS like letterforms, I made my own out of SVG shape data.
A single line font based on letter gothic
Page 1 of the flamingo genome
The major drawbacks of the approach are thus:
It’s really time consuming to make a font.
really time consuming.
you don’t get any of the niceties of a real font, like spacing pairs, leading, or anything. at all.
The pros are thus:
You can make single line letter cuts on the laser cutter. That’s about all it is good for (right now)!
the spiral single line text cut on the laser cutter
I’d like to get this going to some kind of physical interface in real time. Maybe pencils and stepper motors, who knows.