OpenSCAD MakerBot Font Module

After seeing the great work of tbuser and avrgeek I was inspired to create an OpenSCAD module for the font used by MakerBot Industries.

The font itself is called Designer Block by K-Type (http://www.k-type.com/?p=296). It's free for personal use but K-Type require a paid license for commercial use. I've licensed this Thing under a non-commercial license to highlight this. If you own a license for the font then feel free to contact me for a relicensed version of this Thing that you can derive for commercial use.

I had hoped to extend avrgeek's code to provide proper support for variable-width fonts. Unfortunately the limitations in the OpenSCAD language hampered my efforts but the examples provided show how you can manually kern the text to get around this problem.

You'll see from the Character Test that some of the characters (G, H, T and ?) currently fail to render. This is apparently due to a winding direction problem I've yet to fix. For the MBI logo I've worked around it by carefully hacking a replacement T out of an I and a hypen. :)

If there is interest in better font support for OpenSCAD I might look into some of the scripting language interfaces that may be useful for generating OpenSCAD code that will properly kern the selected font. As it stands you might be better off just typing up the text in Inkscape and importing it into OpenSCAD as a DXF for linear extrusion.

I've included avrgeek's Customize.txt which contains basic instructions for porting new fonts.

I have yet to print anything using this font so I have no idea whether it will even work. :)