Spherical Font Samplers by pmoews

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

Polymaker has made a collection of fonts for openSCAD available. There are 586 fonts in the collection of which just over 200 are marked as working. Here is openSCAD code to make samples of the fonts and check to see how they print. I've tried to make the code general enough so that it is easy to make the change from one font to another.
A spherical surface was chosen as it is an easy way to present the letters in a variety of orientations. The openSCAD programs write the letters on the upper half of a sphere.
I wanted to show text written on the inside of the sphere and so a second verson contains a hole to make a container. Some of the text was moved to the top of the container so that all of the symbols could still be shown. The image at the left shows a sphere with the PT_Sans_Web_Regular font and a container with the OpenSans_Regular font.
The letters of the alphabet, small and capital, and the numbers from 0 through 9, for a total of 62 charaters, appear on the sphere. Other symbols were not checked. As I tried the fonts I found errors of two types: one - the letters were missing parts, and two - a letter or number was not a valid 2 manifold. Letters which were not valid 2 manifolds had to be removed before a font sphere could be formed. I checked 12 fonts, half of which had at least one error. See table below.
One can imagine other uses for this code. Three line poetry could take the place of the fonts. The container could be used to hold small objects. I've been told that the open sphere is perfectly sized for a miniature hampster home.