[Shel]

Whew!  Dodged that bullet after much handwringing.  Dunno when I’ll try Win 10 again, if ever.

Anyway, here’s a zip with the Cocoa Bird problem fixed, and – no big surprise – two additional fonts, both licensed under SIL OFL.  Cocoa Little Princess based on Princess Sofia, and Cocoa Pancakes based on Short Stack.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/quupalfxunjf3cq/hersheydata%2005.zip?dl=0

[Shel]

[EDIT: Please stand by – I’ve found a very odd problem with the Cocoa Bird face, but I’m in the middle of switching to Windows 10, so may be off-the-air for ??? period of time.

In this latest version I’ve kept the font shapes all the same, but have regularized, as much as possible, their sizes.  This makes a visual difference when the font samples are being displayed, and thus perhaps makes it slightly easier for user to compare faces.

This is just the hersheydata.py file, you’ll need the previous zip for hershey.py and hershey.inx

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqkilhxwzpfchl7/hersheydata%2004.zip?dl=0

Here is the font names crossreference to original names:

Cocoa Allure            <= Allura                    SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Bird                <= Bilbo                    SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Bird Swash Caps    <= Bilbo Swash Caps            SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Brush                <= Alex Brush                SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Capitol            <= Sacramento                SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Casual Hand        <= Covered By Your Grace    SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Delight            <= Delius                    SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Delight Swash Caps<= Delius Swash Caps        SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Elfin                <= Mountains of Christmas    SIL OFL per metadata, though google cites Apache License, version 2.0
Cocoa Felix                <= Felipa                    SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Herculean            <= Poiret One                SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Invite            <= Tangerine                metadata silent, but SIL OFL per google and fontsquirrel
Cocoa League            <= League Script            SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Misty Night        <= Foglihten No03            SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Neato                <= Bad Script                SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Osmotron            <= Orbitron Regular            SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Pepita            <= Pecita                    SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Qwandry            <= Qwigley                    SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Society            <= Mrs Saint Delafield        SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Swiss                <= Italianno                SIL OFL per metadata
Cocoa Tech                <= Architects Daughter        metadata silent, but SIL OFL per google

[Shel]

[EDIT: Hopefully the last of these, but see next message]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b8l6x9uytysytln/hersheydata%2003.zip?dl=0

[Shel]

Here’s the files but with two additional fonts compared with May 26 version:

[EDIT: Ho hum, added yet another, see next message for the link]
https://www.dropbox.com/s/x37ayun6e08ec5j/hersheydata%2002.zip?dl=0

[Shel]

In case you would like the new hershey-related files, I have zipped them and put them in dropbox.com  This is my first time using dropbox, so I’m not 100% confident that I’ve “got the hang of it”.  8^)

Yes, it is huge isn’t it (and my own personal copy is “huger”, as I’ve included for my own personal use some additional fonts which are free but not covered under SIL OFL).

[EDIT: See following post for these files with two more fonts added.]
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pvui6438o6dlvmu/hersheydata.zip?dl=0

[Shel]

Something like this?  (I chose the word “sample” rather than “table”, because I thought that perhaps to a non-technical person generating a “table” might sound more intimidating than generating a “sample”.  No biggy.)

I hope you had a good time at the Maker Faire!  8^)

[Shel]

I’m thinking that with all the font choices, user may need some help choosing the “perfect” one.  So…I’ve suggested a bit of an expansion to the action dropdown in hershey.inx.  Below is an image to illustrate:

[Shel]

I’ve been fontifying quite a bit, as you can see.  I wish I had been more consistent in a number of my design decisions, but overall I’m pretty pleased.  Not really professional quality, but definitely usable for eggbot I would venture.  Your pointing me to google was a “goodo”  8^) , though I think they do not have all of the SIL OFL faces.

I have checked the metadata in all the exemplars, and all state that they are licensed with SIL OFL (except Tangerine has nothing in the metadata, though both fontsquirrel and google claim the SIL OFL license applies.  I have an email request in with fontsquirrel requesting the source of their licensing info.)

Yeah, I see what you mean about the naming problem.  If I had designed one of those fonts, I for sure would not want to see it hacked up by somebody like me without changing the name.

I find that hershey.py annoyingly has two casts to integer in draw_svg_text.  For use here I’ve changed the casts to float.  The only difference is that the cast to integer forces character location to integer values, which leaves an ambiguity of up to 1 step in character position.  Once the character is positioned, hershey.py allows my more-precise values for the character shape.  A possible workaround would be for me to do the conversion to hershey at a larger size.  This would presumably cause user to scale it down, so the character position ambiguity would be reduce to less than one step.

Thus, your experimental skip-pen-up-down (“SPUD”?) would perhaps only marginally work on the integer text.  Dunno, you’d have to try it.  With the two casts changed to float, I get beautiful joinage of joinable cursive characters.  I was not, however, thinking of your SPUD algorithm when I did the fonts, so the beginning and end of cursive characters is not readily identifiable.  This could be fixed by my reworking the fonts if it proves desirable.

[Shel]

Added another cuppla fonts – am running out of styles…could use some suggestions.  or not.

[Shel]

Glad you like them!  8^)

1.  Perhaps we could acknowledge the designer while making it clear that the designer is not responsible for this incarnation, by doing something like:  prepending “Like ” or “Derived from ” or “Not ” or “Based on ” or “Eggbot-“, rather than simply making up descriptive names???

1a. For what it’s worth, at http://www.dafont.com/jenna-sue.font the author is quoted as:

Note of the author

A casual handwritten font, handmade with care by yours truly. Includes numbers and punctuation.

Free for personal AND commercial use. That’s right, FREE. 100% Free, no need to ask permission!

And the license.txt file that accompanied the download said:

Free for personal or commercial use. That’s right, FREE. 100% Free, for any project. No need to ask permission… just use it! Enjoy :)
xoxo
Jenna Sue

2.  I’ll review and touch-up if necessary the three fonts you have mentioned.  What would you like me to submit to you – just the text lines to be inserted into hersheydata.py and hershey.inx, or new hersheydata.py and hershey.inx?
And where should they be sent?  service@evilmadscientist.com, or someplace else?  Or maybe you want to open an issue at github and I’ll send them there?

3. Would you also like the .svg files I generated where I hand-traced each glyph, and which are the input files to the Visual Basic 6 svg-to-hershey program?

4. I would be glad to give you the VB6 program, but it is very very creaky and windows only.  Would you like me to rewrite the VB6 program in python?  It would be a good python learning experience for me.

5. If you wish me to give the same treatment to additional fonts, please let me know, I’d be happy to – this is kinda fun!  8^)

[Shel]

I added two more fonts since earlier post.

[Shel]

Oh, silly me!  I shoulda been able to figure that out.  Thanks much for the digging!!  8^)

[Shel]

I can’t make my image show up inline.  I click the “Insert Image” icon, and fill in the URL – I’ve tried flickr and imgur, and all I get inline is an icon for no image.  I must be doing something really stupid, but I don’t know what it is!!??

[Shel]

Well, are there any particular fonts you have been hankering for? I’d be glad to take a hack at it – my results would only be mediocre-to-fairly good, but I’d be happy for the practice.  Up to a small handful of fonts?  (There are plenty of free-to-use-for-any-purposes out there.)

On the editor idea…If you felt strongly enough about it to create a github issue, I would be glad to at least consider undertaking creation of an Inkscape extension to accomplish this.  Nothing fancy, and probably a bit complicated to use, but maybe with the kind of back-and-forth we did on the hatch extension we could get it done.

[Shel]

I’ve been pondering this topic a bunch.  My inclination for the moment is to not attempt what is by all accounts the hugely complicated task of automating the process.

Nonetheless, to try to educate myself about the snags involved, I tried manually converting a few free fonts to vector format.  I have evolved a system that, while far from perfect, is perhaps useful.  It enables me to convert an appropriate font to single-vector style in just a few hours.  The strokes are completely manually performed in Inkscape, then the resulting .svg files are put through the wringer in a Visual Basic 6(!) program I wrote.

The output of the VB6 program is a line of text defining the font face in hershey vector format as used in a completely stock hershey.py.  The text line can then be copied into a stock hersheydata.py.

The image below is of three different fonts I’ve vectorized, along with the stock Sans 1-stroke, and the picture comes from the attached .svg [whoops, I don’t see how to attach an svg, so we’ll ignore that for the moment.]

I feel that the manually transcribed vectors yield a perhaps more “supple” text effect than the standard Hershey fonts.  Oh, I should mention that I took the liberty of pushing the Hershey envelope by going to higher precision.  I think it’s this higher precision which gives the new text a less “pedantic” feel.  I think the century has come when we can throw off some of the constraints Hershey worked within a half century ago.

I did _not_, however, change anything in hershey.py – so the new schema is as far as I know completely compatible.

What do you think – is this method interesting enough to pursue?  Or should I just keep it for my in-house use.

Oh, rats, I see I can’t paste an image here without exceeding the allowed character count.  I guess I’ll have to finally open a flickr account or something.
OK, let’s see if I’ve flickrized it:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/35400824@N03/shares/n1gH7X

[Author]

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