Curved Text

dannyi

Is there a tutorial that shows EXACTLY how to put text on a cylindrical surface?  

coleman

@dannyi

There is a great feature script for this: 
    
http://store.parametricparts.com/store/p10/CURVED-TEXT-1.0

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/cfec40e2b66bb4ddb2f3414b/w/24132f252a02825eb0606641/e/7a70ac021729253c4df9d213

coleman

@dannyi

There is a great feature script for this: 
    
http://store.parametricparts.com/store/p10/CURVED-TEXT-1.0

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/cfec40e2b66bb4ddb2f3414b/w/24132f252a02825eb0606641/e/7a70ac021729253c4df9d213

dannyi

Thanks, got the app, now what do I do? I need this in my document. 

dannyi

Also, where is the app? Do I have to purchase it every time I need it? Am I suppose to save the link in bookmarks? How does this work?

dave_cowden

Hi, @dannyi

I'm the author of the 3d text script.  It is not an app, it is a featurescript.  It is free to use.  

You use it by adding 3d text to your toolbar. After you do that, you can use it in any document you wish.  You can learn more here, specifically the section titled "start using custom features"..

I have created quite a few features, here you can use them all for free.  Curved text, socket screws, enhanced planes, and thread creator are the most popular.

Hope that helps!
Dave

dannyi

Thanks Dave, this can be overwhelming to a 62 year old but to stay competitive in business nowadays I feel one needs to stay current with technology. I just have a hard time grasping all of it! 

dannyi

Okay, here's where the frustrations comes in. Screen shot 1, PP-CurvedText-Beta. Taking for granted this is how to do it. Just guessing here....

dannyi

here's my screen shot.....taking for granted I'm doing it the right, just guessing here....

dannyi

Tried this at least 7 different ways and times.....wish there was a word by word, click by click, step by step tutorial on this simple task....

dannyi

..forgot to add that I clicked and changed every option on the drop down menu for "surface text 1"....

dave_cowden

looks like you did it mostly right!

the thing you need to change-- make sure your baseline is not at the very bottom of the text. a lot of letters actually extend below the baseline ( for example, J).  
I think your example will work great if you put a baseline that's a bit up from the very bottom of your flat surface.

For an extended discussion and a couple of visuals see this thread

coleman

@dave_cowden
I was using your curved text fs the other day for engraving on an injection mold.  Is there anyway to add additional fonts?

dannyi

dave_cowden said:

looks like you did it mostly right!

the thing you need to change-- make sure your baseline is not at the very bottom of the text. a lot of letters actually extend below the baseline ( for example, J).  
I think your example will work great if you put a baseline that's a bit up from the very bottom of your flat surface.

For an extended discussion and a couple of visuals see this thread

Thank you Dave for your patience with me, (something I need to acquire more of with this stuff!) That did the trick. 

dave_cowden

@dannyi glad that worked for you!
@coleman unfortunately not, this feature is limited to the fonts available in the built-in onshape sketch text function. if there are fonts there not available in curved text, I can add them. Otherwise, adding more fonts is possible but fairly difficult

owen_sparks

@coleman @dave_cowden

Hi gents.

If there is any way a single line / single stick font could be included that would be really useful for CNC engraving.

Owen S.

dave_cowden

hi @owen_sparks
interesting idea.  It would be realy cool and valuable for sure. A few thoughts in no particular order:

* This would be useful as a sketch function, not just 'curved text'. 
* Onshape does not provide support for adding functions to sketch mode
* Onshape does not support adding fonts
* it is possible, not conceptually hard, but tedious and potentially difficult to draw all the characters by hand.  
* What charset would we support? ASCII would be not that much work, but for example for global users creating a font requires thousands of characters in UTF-8 or UTF-16

Franky, I'm not super-excited right now about doing this work. Not because it wouldn't be cool ( it would be), or a great add-in for curved text(also true), but because Onshape is not providing me any reasonable way to monetize any of this work. I'm afraid i'm at the point where I simply cannot justify continued work without some path to make something for my efforts.

Right now, i'm kind of in a holding pattern on new development until I can figure out what the work i've done is worth......  

A token system has been proposed that would be great-- each paid onshape plan comes with (say) 1000 credits to spend on featurescripts, and then Onshape sets how much $ want to pay authors for each credit. That way, users can avoid the overhead of payment, but i can still make money _somehow_.

I would appreciate all the help from the community that i can get on this. 

owen_sparks

Hi Dave.  Good to hear from you.

Good points, and I understand your position.

FS was introduced with much fanfare, I believe the term "floodgates" was used once.  However it seems (currently) to be too hard to use for novice coders, and not have the facility to monitize (still) the work of profesionals.  As such it's kinda fizzled out a tad, for a good percentage of the target audience.  This is a real shame, hopefully it'll improve.

Good point on the FS can't output sketches comment :OwenSmacksForeheadSmiley:

Just on a theoretical discussion... It can do faces though I believe?  How about something like this?



The FS could build the surfaces; the user then makes a skech, box selects all the surfaces and uses/projects them onto the sketch, then exports the sketch as a dxf?  It's a bit naff but gets there, erm sort of.

Whomever came up with that token scheme idea deserves a couple of free months OS subscription, or at least a beer

Cheers,

Owen S.

dave_cowden

hi @owen_sparks

Yep, its definitely do-able to do stick text. in fact, it wouldnt be all that hard to add to my current feature and have it work on curved surfaces.

Most of the effort lies in the logical extension of your simple example: creating a parameterized, 'stick' version of all posible characters

I could do it-- probably in about 2 days for ascii only. what scares me is the requests that will come after that: "hey, i work in spain, and you dont support latin characters in ISO-8859-1! or even worse, 'hey, i'm in china and you dont support UTF-8 chinese, you dumb ego-centric american!"

michael_haws

Is it safe to assume that this would work for writing text on a sphere?

dave_cowden

hi @michael_haws

Yes, you can write text on a sphere. Make sure to try out the latest version, which is more robust and faster

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/cad175bd2990f3c9314a1c10/w/05ec37b276b1dd333f6afc16/e/08c7b53ee50a34dc6966a026

brian_jordan

@dave_cowden Many thanks for adding this functionality to OS. I use it quite a lot when producing personalised items for 3D printing. Your work allows me to add a professional touch to my work and I would happily part with some of my hard-earned for a licence of some sort if it meant you could keep developing it.

dave_cowden

@brian_jordan thanks for the kind words and the example.  I do hope to eventually license these additions, but meanwhile thanks for being an early adopter. Let me know how the new version works for you. The kerning feature gives much better control of text, and it should perform better.

brian_jordan

dave_cowden said:

... The kerning feature gives much better control of text, and it should perform better.

NICE! Thanks

jeffrey_bush871

This is a great feature but I wish it wouldn't strip/trim spaces off the front/back to allow for fine adjustment of leading/trailing space. Another solution would be to have an option for this space, but as long as I could have 1 space I could adjust its kerning to whatever and get the same effect.

jeffrey_bush871

I did find that I could add a zero-width-space (http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/200B/index.htm) which isn't counted as whitespace but is otherwise invisible. Kerning can be applied to it and adjust the offset.

patrick_anthony

dave_cowden said:

Hi, @dannyi

I'm the author of the 3d text script.  It is not an app, it is a featurescript.  It is free to use.  

You use it by adding 3d text to your toolbar. After you do that, you can use it in any document you wish.  You can learn more here, specifically the section titled "start using custom features"..

I have created quite a few features, here you can use them all for free.  Curved text, socket screws, enhanced planes, and thread creator are the most popular.

Hope that helps!
Dave

patrick_anthony

Is this feature available for use by hobbists using a free public account ??

john_mcclary

If it is a public document it is free to do pretty much anything you want, copy, export, etc.

If they didn't want you to use it, they would have made it private and not posted a shareable link 

Most people here are more than happy to share thier featurescripts or public models. If you ask nicely someone may even write one from scratch just for you. I owe one person esspecially a lot. He has helped me with a bunch of scripts. He even pops in and maintains them time to time when there is an update. Great people around this community.

dave_cowden

@patrick_anthony yep, free to use! Give it a try I think you will like it.