This brings support for not just paragraphs of text, but also for handling mixed text with different sizes and styles, in whatever way it is laid out on a page.Īs an advanced feature, the new Hershey Text supports a subtle means of text substitution. The second major change is that instead of entering text (one line at a time) in the dialog box, the new Hershey Text now converts text in the document, replacing it in place. One company is already making new handwriting fonts compatible with the new format. Migrating to SVG fonts immediately gets us support for font editors, arbitrary shapes within fonts (not just straight segments), international character and Unicode support, and separate files for the fonts - making it practical to add new fonts. Characters (glyphs) within an SVG font are composed of little SVG drawings, which (in contrast to almost every other modern font format) can natively support stroke fonts. While this is not a common font format, it is a standard, and that fact makes it possible to create and add new fonts with relative ease. SVG Fontsįirst, the new version uses the SVG font format. Hershey Text v 3.0 aims to resolve all of these issues. This left no facility for rendering paragraphs of text, nor for easily working with multiple fonts, sizes, or styles. This made adding new fonts (even with data available) extremely cumbersome.Īdditionally, the function of the original Hershey Text was relatively simplistic: It rendered text that you entered in the text entry box. All of the font data was stored in a single large file.The font data was encoded by ASCII character position, and did not support basic international (Latin-1) characters, let alone Unicode.The font format only supported characters made of straight line segments.As a “custom” (neither proprietary nor standard) font format, there was no readily available font editor that could be used. The mechanism for drawing fonts was based on a historic font format that turned out to be quite limiting: The original Hershey Text worked quite well, but was limited in scope. Fonts like these are usually the best choice for pen plotters, machine tools, and other circumstances where the pen width itself is significant. Fonts like these are appropriate for use in laser printers or other high-resolution devices.īy contrast, an engraving font (sometimes called a “stroke” font) is one where each visible character is defined by the stroke itself, not the area enclosed by it. That is to say, the visible part of a character in an outline font is the area enclosed by the shape. In these, each glyph in the font defines a filled vector shape. Hershey Text v 3.0 will be bundled into future versions of Inkscape, but it’s also included with the new AxiDraw software and available on its own for download today.Īll common computer font formats (TrueType, et al.) are outline font formats. We have a comprehensive user guide for it as well. We are very pleased this week to release an all-new version of Hershey Text, written from scratch, and far more useful, capable, and extensible. Hershey text could take a little bit of text that you would type and render it into stroke fonts, also known as engraving fonts. Some years ago we wrote a neat little Inkscape extension called Hershey Text.
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