My installed Japanese fonts are showing up fine in MoI 3.0 beta (when copying and pasting your text), under OSX 10.6.8.

Regards
Stefan

Interesting. I'm in Windows. I'm not sure if that makes a difference or not.

Thanks for the rotate script!

I just wish MOI had some very basic text formatting built in.

Hi Paul, I would guess that it's a problem with the specific font that you're using.

Here's what I get for example on Windows 7 using the current v3 beta with your same text:



I tried several different fonts and of course many don't have those characters in them at all but for the ones that do I could not repeat any rotation problem.

Which particular font are you using? Maybe the font itself has rotated characters inside it is about the only thing I can think of...

- Michael

Hi Paul,

> I just wish MOI had some very basic text formatting built in.

You mean like specifying a rotation of individual letters? That's something that I would think would be in a category of really quite fancy formatting, that's not typically available in the basic text formatting of any word processor for example...

- Michael

Hi Paul, ok I'm able to repeat the rotation with certain fonts - the ones at the top of the font list that have a @ at the beginning of their name.

But I think that's how it is supposed to be - those fonts are meant for vertically arranged text rather than horizontally arranged text and so the individual characters are rotated by 90 degrees because the entire line of text is also supposed to be rotated. So if you're using a font like that you would need to apply a 90 degree rotation not on each individual letter but on the entire string of text (just one rotation with the whole thing selected).

If you want to have the text arranged in a horizontal manner like MoI's default layout then you would want to use a font that supports that which I guess is one that does not start with an @ in its name. Otherwise if you use a font meant for vertical layout you would want to rotate the entire text 90 degrees to get the result that the font is intended to be used for.

So for example using a font like this with the letter rotation that you were seeing:




Select all that and use the rotation grip on the edit frame to rotate it 90 degrees to get this result which I think is how these particular fonts are intended to be used:





- Michael

Wow that's interesting! I had no idea the @ fonts were meant for vertical typing.

In Illustrator, the font types horizontally unless I use the vertical type tool.
By basic formatting, I guess because I use a lot of Adobe stuff, I'm used to what they offer in all their products. Font size, height, width, kerning, force all caps, spacing between characters, etc.

Things like type along curve would be really great (maybe it exists - I don't normally do a lot of text).

I managed to get my design built, but had to send it over to 3D Coat to finish it. Some of the objects were too detailed to boolean together & MOI kept freaking out. I'm sending this off to be 3D printed, so I'll merge everything together as voxels and then decimate them in 3D Coat & export an STL there.

Thanks!

Paul

Hi Paul,

> In Illustrator, the font types horizontally unless I use the vertical type tool.

Hmmm, I guess they must have some special handling of the @ fonts to do that. I could do something like that in MoI too - basically "unrotate" the already-rotated characters from those @ fonts when processing stuff. I guess I'd better make absolutely sure that all @ fonts are supposed to be already rotated like that.


> By basic formatting, I guess because I use a lot of Adobe stuff, I'm used to what they
> offer in all their products. Font size, height, width, kerning, force all caps, spacing between
> characters, etc.

I'd definitely characterize stuff like kerning adjustment to not be just basic formatting - those are advanced typesetting controls for programs that have a significant focus on generating printed text output... MoI just does not have that same kind of overall 2D print oriented focus in it. I do want to add more stuff in that general area in the future but I'm not sure if it will ever get to the same level of detail as a more dedicated 2D tool.


> Things like type along curve would be really great (maybe it exists - I don't normally do a lot of text).

I think that eventually this will get added as a part of the Text tool. In the meantime, it is possible now in v3 to use the new Flow command to edit text to apply it to a curve though, see here for an example: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5097.2 , that can get it done right now.

- Michael

With no personal knowledge whatsoever, here is a link to the question: "Why do some font names begin with an at-sign?"

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/07/19/10331400.aspx

Hi Brian, thanks - I think that confirms it pretty well.

But now that I think about it, I guess I had probably better leave things as they currently are - otherwise if I process these fonts to rotate their letters it would mean that you could not use them anymore for their original purpose of making vertically oriented text after doing just one single rotate on the entire word.

In order to make a change to how it works currently in MoI I think I would have to not just "unrotate" these characters (which makes it more difficult to do vertical text), I'd need to also have some additional control for saying whether you want vertical or horizontal text so that you could enable that to get vertical text. But adding in more controls tends to complicate the UI and so that's a more significant change that I'm not sure about making right now.

Also that article you linked to: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/07/19/10331400.aspx makes it pretty clear that these fonts are intended to have rotated letters in them so that the entire string of horizontal text can be rotated 90 degrees afterwards, so MoI's current behavior is I think how it's supposed to work. Also as mentioned in the article these fonts do not actually have every single letter in them rotated, some non-CJK characters are not rotated in these fonts, so just applying an "unrotate" to all characters would actually make an incorrect rotation in some situations and also some CJK characters use a different variant for the vertical character so trying to "unrotate" them does not seem to be what you're supposed to do.

From what I can tell, the result that you get in MoI with the rotated characters (thus enabling vertical text after a 90 degree rotation on the entire word) is what is supposed to happen when using one of these particular @ fonts. It's just surprising to someone who does not regularly use these languages.

- Michael

Or I guess another solution would be to just not list the @ fonts in the MoI font dropdown.

But that would then mean that it would be more difficult to get this type of vertical CJK text, so maybe that's not such a good idea either...

- Michael

what I do when moi is having trouble boolean joining some solids, I try trimming them together, if than does not work, leaving them has solids, export the lot to a single STL, then upload load it to http://cloud.netfabb.com/ it does a great job and joining up objects, including surfaces with solids.