[vtk-developers] vtkVectorText -- to deprecate or not?

[David Lonie]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 12:51 AM, David Thompson
<david.thompson at kitware.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>>> ... I propose a long-term deprecation period for vtkVectorText, favoring
>>> vtkTextActor3D ...
>> I guess the only advantage of vtkVectorText is that it is a source that produces polygonal letters. It can be used in a pipeline.
>
> +1 (no deprecation until something else can provide character outlines as polydata). But vtkVectorText should at least have a "see also" in its docs pointing to the new actors that will likely be of more use.

I should point out here that I added a vtkPath class, which stores a
path consisting of Bezier curves, a while back, as well as the ability
to generate these paths from strings. Both FreeTypeUtilities and
MathTextUtilities support this, and this is actually how most
characters are stored in many font formats.

Seems like string->path->polydata would be one way forward, though
we'll need to write a filter that strokes the path into polydata. This
would at least get us to an outline of the text. Filling in the
outlines and getting the cells right would be tricky...But there's
probably an algorithm out there that can do this. That (along with the
higher demands on CPU) would be the biggest challenge.

Dave