there are some changes to vectorChar and vectorText, which will become part of V3 JSCAD. if you have time then please take a look.

https://github.com/jscad/OpenJSCAD.org/pull/1252

As a very first starting point I've implemented a new function "text" in package @jscad/modeling.text which directly creates Path2 arrays.

It is currently part of my own fork of OpenJSCAD only, as I expect multiple changes before it might get accepted and become ready for an official PR. Additionally, my tests are still almost empty (as I have to learn AVA first) and only test for an execution w/o throwing any exceptions...

Happy Easter!

I think most of your suggestions are spot on. The logic of vectorChar and vectorText are solid but these data structures don’t produce anything that can be immediately used.

I’m not certain which direction will be taken, so I created a new issue to track these ideas, #1067

suggestions would depend on whether you would accept breaking API changes or prefer keeping the API stable.

A somewhat silly idea could be to assign the output of vectorText to its own subproperty segments (outlines.segments = outlines) : in that case, one would always have to convert outlines.segments.

From a user's point of view, however, the main question should probably be why vectorChar and vectorText do not produce paths right away - and why there are two such methods (since vectorText looks like a superset of vectorChar).

A possible non-breaking consequence could be: invent a new function textPaths (or similar) with a signature like vectorText which directly produces paths:

const { textPaths } = require('@jscad/modeling').text
const paths = textPaths('JSCAD')

Such a method should be trivial to implement.

With greetings from Germany,

Andreas Rozek

I also noticed the inconsistency, and wondered if these could be brought into a slightly more useful paradigm. Do you have any suggestions?