Spiral Wrapped Text

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!!! THIS PAGE IS AN UNFINISHED DRAFT !!!

Introduction

Creating long passages of text which gently spiral around an egg makes for a fun and striking design. Make an egg with a favorite poem, text passage, or even an egg related recipe! This extension will automatically size your text to achieve a desired number of wraps around an egg. The text itself is drawn with vector fonts selected for use with the Eggbot [1]. The extension draws these fonts as paths: they do not need to be converted to paths before plotting.

Basic operation

Type the text to be spiral wrapped in the extension's "Text" input field and then enter the number of times to wrap the text around the egg. You may optionally select one of three font styles: Sans, Times, or Script. If your text uses the characters "&" or "<" then they must be entered, respectively, as "&ampamp;;" or "&lt;"

The number of times to wrap need not be a whole number: you may enter values such as 8.5. The extension will size the text to achieve the necessary overall length. For instance, if you enter 8.5, then the text will have an overall length of 8.5×3200 pixels. Consequently, the more number of times the text wraps around the egg, the larger the size of the text. If the text seems too small, just increase the amount of wrapping. Conversely, if it is too large, decrease the amount wrapping. Note that if the text scales to too large of a size, then the wrapped text may overlap between wraps. If this occurs, decrease the size of the text by decreasing the amount of wrapping.

The three font styles, Sans, Times, and Script, represent a single stroke font without serifs (Sans), a Roman font with serifs (Times), and a single stroke cursive font (Script). These fonts correspond to the "Sans 1-stroke", "Serif medium", and "Script 1-stroke" fonts of the Hershey Text extension.

Note that the extension's text input field is not very friendly: it's difficult to see all your text at once or to move about within the text. This is an Inkscape limitation. You may find it easier to edit your text in some other application and then cut-and-paste it into the extension's text input field [2].

Changing fonts and other markup

This extensions supports a simple markup language which allows switching between font families as well as selecting between bold, italics, and emphasized styles. This markup language uses an HTML-like syntax,

<command>some text</command>

where "command" is a directive. For example, to select one of the three font families Sans, Times, or Roman, you may use

<sans>some text</sans>

<times>some text</times>

<script>some text</script>

Note that you do not need to enter "&lt;" for the "<".

<b>Some bold text</b>

<em>Some emphasized text</em>

<t>Some italicized text</it>

Note that the Sans font family has no italicized font while italics is redundant for the Script font family.

	Normal	Bold	Italics	Italics + Bold
Sans	Sans 1-stroke	Sans bold	Sans 1-stroke	Sans bold
Times	Serif medium	Serif bold	Serif medium italic	Serif bold italic
Script	Script 1-stroke	Script medium	Script 1-stroke	Script medium

To select specific fonts, use the tags

Font	Markup
Sans 1-stroke	<futural>text</futural>
Sans bold	<futuram>text</futuram>
Serif medium	<timesr>text</timesr>
Serif medium italic	<timesi>text</timesi>
Serif bold italic	<timesib>text</timesib>
Serif bold	<timesrb>text</timesrb>
Script 1-stroke	<scripts>text</scripts>
Script 1-stroke (alt)	<cursive>text</cursive>
Script medium	<scriptc>text</scriptc>
Gothic English	<gothiceng>text</gothiceng>
Gothic German	<gothicger>text</gothicger>
Gothic Italian	<gothicita>text</gothicita>
Greek 1-stroke	<greek>text</greek>
Greek medium	<timesg>text</timesg>
Cyrillic	<cyrillic>text</cyrillic>
Japanese	<japanese>text</japanese>
Astrology	<astrology>text</astrology>
Math (lower)	<mathlow>text</mathlow>
Math (upper)	<mathupp>text</mathupp>
Markers	<markers>text</markers>
Meteorology	<meteorology>text</meteorology>
Music	<music>text</music>
Symbolic	<symbolic>text</symbolic>

Additional controls

To account for the horizontal compression which occurs when plotting on eggs, select the "Stretch the text horizontally..." checkbox. That will horizontally stretch the text by 50% [3].

To rotate the text 180 degrees turning it upside down, check the "Plot with the egg's bottom at the egg motor?" checkbox. You do not need to use this option if you have reversed the motion of both motors in the Options tab of the Eggbot Control extension.

Notes

1. For more information on these fonts, please see [Hershey Text].
2. On Mac OS X, this can be difficult: you need to change the X11 preferences to allow cut and paste operations between the clipboard and pasteboard. This, however, is not a mode you want to leave enabled as it causes cut and paste operations on elements in your Inkscape drawings to work incorrectly. So, do not leave X11's cut and paste enabled.
3. This horizontal compression is a result of the egg's horizontal or equatorial circumference being less than its pole-to-pole circumference.

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