Edit string per character

Hi, first off i want to say keep up the great work. Iam starting to love nodebox. But there are some things i cant get my head around. I am sure i am doing this wrong.. Basicaly i want to use resample on each individual character of a string and have some kind of control over it.

So i made sample node and this list of values should control the amount (lenght) of resample. Of course what happens when i plug the list into resample, it resamples whole string with that value so i have many differently resampled characters on top of eather.

I have found contour node aroud here on forums which does nearly the same thing, it breaks string into individual contures, problem is it breaks compound paths so it generaly doesnt work how i need it to because it resamples each individual contour not character.

So i end separating each character by hand always picking first value of list and moving the list. And this is obviously very wrong way to do it, coz i loose the flexibility of chaning the input string and i also have to do kerning by hand :D.

Please, what would be the best way to do this? Thank you

You're correct, this is tricky. The issue is the spacing; if we wouldn't care about the spacing (or use a monospaced font) then we could handle every letter individually. Also, because letters can consist of multiple contours, just splitting by contours doesn't solve this problem.

The only node that has knowledge of letter spacing is the textpath node. Therefore, I could augment it so that it can return either one path for the whole string, or a list of paths, one per letter (and maybe also one per word).

When you have a list of individual paths, one per letter, and spaced correctly, you can process it further downstream.

Would that solve your problem?

Thanks for response.. just not worry about it, i asked if there is no simple solution. Its nice proof of concept for me and atleast ill have to force myself to program it with procesing and geomerative.

Pitty i am a bit lost with how to program nodebox, i understand how it works but it just seem too akward and as with every programing environment.. its a lot about documentation. I believe big success of processing and for example jquery and django is documentation. I can write some python (and acutaly want to learn it much more, thats why i started to mess with nodebox in first palce) its great language, i dont like processing because its java. Processing is ok when you do little things, but when you do something more specific, you start to use java libraries and then it gets realy messy. I would rather program things for print in something that works with vectors like nodebox, than use processing that can do everything but when you want to make stupid A4 size of paper pdf, you have to use java libraries anyway.

I know just development is sooo much work. But if there would be a nice way how to make own nodes (i know its simple but it feels wierd) and especialy if nodebox would have good documentation. I think it could potentionaly interest many people who want to do generative print. Why? Its much more visible and handsdown.

Totaly killer thing would be ability to somehow share nodes. Little sharing repository website of nodes. That would make great comunity around it and after some time you would have extensive library of useable nodes.

AHH i am getting totaly ahead of myself. Sorry. Just i would love that. I know how people share code on open processing (which is also part of the processings succes).

Nevermind i wish you power for development. Ill dig much more into it nodebox when i get some time, so maybe ill annoy here on forums again someday :)

Hey,

Thanks for your remarks.

• We are working on more documentation.
• Making nodes now is intentionally hard because we still want to change the graphics API internally. As soon as the internal APIs are stable, we will integrate the editor into the application, making creating your own nodes as easy as pressing "view source" in the browser.
• We are also working on a "node store" that will allow people to publish, share and download nodes.

Kind regards,

F