James “techninja” Todd has just released Hershey Text JS, a port of the Hershey fonts to JSON, capable of being rendered quickly via JavaScript & SVG.
The Hershey fonts a classic set of “engraving” or “stroke based” (as opposed to outline based) fonts that are excellent for use with all kinds of physical cutting, drawing, and painting machines. Several years ago we introduced the Hershey Text extension for Inkscape, and you can find a more in depth introduction to the Hershey fonts in that article. Hershey Text JS is adapted from our Inkscape extension, and provides easy access to the font data for programmers who prefer to work in javascript.
I had absolutely no luck getting the hershey inkscape extension to work on yosemite with a pristine install of inkscape installed exactly as described in the other post. But, this web based thing obviously works. If you right click on the rendered page and select “view source” then locate the SVG element, you can copy the entire HTML/SVG tag as text, paste it into a text editor, save it as an SVG file, then open it up with whatever you use to view and edit SVG vectors. Neato! I wonder how I could add my own single line fonts to it?
Things keep changing with every edition of Inkscape and of MacOS. You need to use a fresh copy of Inkscape, the latest version of the extension, and perform a manual install. We are working on updating the EggBot repository with new installers that should bring everything up to date.
Ok, I’ll have to try it again.
This internet thing never lets anything promotional die. Actual utilities die, but the tweets and blog posts announcing tricky problems being solved never seem to die. Didn’t we (international hand gesture indicating us-all) lose the formula for concrete at one point? I guess that’s a good model to follow… we got it back eventually.