This script takes text and makes it 3d. I know this has been done before but I thought this was a unique approach, so here it is. The script uses the Cairo and Pango libraries to render with whatever fonts you have installed (should be cross-platform though I have only tested on Linux). The thing that differentiates this approach most from others is that the text is anti-aliased.

The latest code will always be here: https://github.com/brad/text2surface

NOTE: This suffers from the same size limitation as it's predecessor, so if you make the text too large OpenSCAD will crash when rendering it. I've found 70 to be a good font size for a sign that spans the build platform, so that's the default.

Updates ======= 2011-09-30: Added ability to extrude non anti-aliased text.

brad@inspiration:~/code/text2surface$ ./text2surface.py --help usage: text2surface.py [-h] [-l] [-r] [-t TEXT] [-f FONTNAME] [-s FONTSTYLE] [-i FONTSIZE] [-d MAXDIM] [-z ZHEIGHT] [-o FILENAME]

Convert text to a surface for OpenSCAD and a .stl if desired.

optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -l List available font families and exit. -r Remove base layer from surface. Only applies if exporting to .scad and/or .stl. -t TEXT The text to convert -f FONTNAME The font family to use, to see a list of available fonts use "-l" -s FONTSTYLE The font style to use. Can be either "italic" or "bold" -i FONTSIZE The font size to use -d MAXDIM The maximum size in mm to make the x or y dimension. Only applies if exporting to .scad and/or .stl. -z ZHEIGHT The max z-height of the text, defaults to 5 -o FILENAME By default, this script just outputs textsurface.dat, which can be imported into an OpenSCAD document. If you specify a .scad filename for this parameter, the script will also output a .scad file which imports the surface. If you specify a .stl filename, the script will go further and generate a .stl file.

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Examples:

reprap.stl (default text is RepRap) ./text2surface.py -f "URW Chancery L" -i 50 -o reprap.stl

ubuntu.stl ./text2surface.py -f Ubuntu -i 50 -t Ubuntu -o ubuntu.stl

polybot.stl ./text2surface.py -f "[F500]" -t polybot -o polybot.stl