This Job is now taken…
I am seeking a Python script author for a paying job.
Please submit a personnel message on this forum if you are interested.
Be sure to mention your hourly rate, and a link to one of your working scripts.
After the presentation is sold, I will be releasing everything for the general public as a gift to use under either GPL or a creative common license.
Thanks, Have a nice day 
Could you maybe describe in more detail what the job is exactly. What is it that you need to be scripted?
I mean if you can describe that in detail I could probably do it for you free of charge.
Thanks Social!
If you do decide to do it for free, let me have a mailing address, and I will send you some organic gourmet coffee from hawaii!
Well,
This seems like it would be a pretty easy thing to do.
I am trying to get an alternative to the current text system in blender.
With Image Magick I am able to take any mono spaced font on my system,
Have the tiled to my specification in a perfect matrix. I already have outline and solid complete…I a working on an Aqua, Glass,Gradients, Chrome ,and 1 pixel offset shadows.
BF-blender dose not give me very nice fonts, I don’t care for the kerning… and solid text is boaring. Plus it is not cross platform, without the use of WINE or virtualization.
What the script would do is break down strings of text into numbers, and then take that number and assign it to a tile/frame of a bill-boarded sprite , hopefully we can have it automatically parent to a camera, or an empty for peoples HUD/Overlay UI … If we cannot do this in real time, I would like the script to just make meshes out of text and planes.
I see that people are starting to tweak the actual game engine… perhaps the solution to my problem would be to tweak the existing text system, so that if it cannot find the indexing pixels at the top of the font texture , it defaults to mono-spaced tiles in a 10x10 matrix.
Or if you can interperate the indexing stuff on the top of the blender fonts, perhaps the script can evaluate the bitmap, and add the spacing information, and poop out a render of the bitmap text with the indexing information all on 1 file.
I am going to write a bunch of different batch files and Linux scripts for the different text effects , The files can be called from inside blender as well because everything I need to pass to image magick , and gimp is all done from the command line… all I need to do to make the linux version is name the file Filename.SH rather than a batch file…
I bet it will work in any unix clone OS, if image magick and GIMP is installed.
The way the blender development is going, I want to keep everything as batch scripts so the end users do not need to depend on blender being compatible just to make a tile set.
I see with a few google searches, that other OpenGL and Direct X applications use a method like this , I would like to keep it so that non-blender users can just run batch file/script file to get nice tile sets.
Here are a couple of example textures, as you can see I still need to work on the alpha channel a bit more for the edges to be smooth.
Well, that is it… Hopefully in the future we can make game fonts with just GIMP and inkscape, by applying the above consept , on a matrix.
The above is not a verry good matrix, I was just following a pattern made by bfblender.
I would like to add more punctuation.
Anyways, my upcomeing project involves volumes and volumes of text, and diffrent fonts for every scene.
I need a crisp clean font, that bf-blender just cannot seem to deliver.
I also work in linux half the time, and my x-Ubuntu’s version of WINE just dosent seem to cut the mustard.
I will have my script’s capable of doing non-monospaced fonts later this afternoon, along with a few more text effects.
TIA for any help…
If you guys dont like to work by the hour, I am accepting bids as well.
If you think you got things figured out, what do you need my help for?
From what you posted, I can only assume that you are looking for some general advice on the matter, on how to get better looking fonts in game?
Personally I would go over ftblender and play around with it some more. Did you play with all the settings in the py script? Try playing with the resolution, and texture sizes. That’s pretty much what makes or breaks the font in-game. If you are going for large text, go for a higher resolution, to avoid any obvious aliasing.
Even if that doesn’t give you the results you want, it’s still a good guide for manually moding the look and feel of the initial solid font (like what you did there).
Also, if you read through the script, you’ll notice a statement that claims the script being “ported to windoze”, meaning that it was probably all a linux thing initially. There was a link there, but it’s dead now. A good search on that wouldn’t hurt, but even if you can’t find a linux version, you can always just use windows to get the TGA, and then edit that on linux to look like you want.
Just don’t go reinventing the wheel if you don’t have to. It’s probably much less effort just to make the current system work for you.
As for the text effects, you want to talk to blendenzo. He’s really the text guy around here. Just go to his site, and take a look at some of the scripts he wrote to manipulate text. It’s neat stuff.
Social is almost correct, ftblender was originally written on Free-BSD. The source was available for several years, but it has since disappeared from the web. I’m sure someone has it, but google searches and link chasing have not turned it up for me yet. Since I use Windows exclusively, I have little ambition to continue looking for it.
As far as not getting the crispness of text you desire, did you use the auto-hinting feature (H key) or not?
I don’t think what you’re hoping for is a bad idea, though. Personally I’ve thought that the text system could stand a good rework for a while now. Mainly, I’d like to see left, right,
center, justify alignment options and some form of wordwrap. The alignment options would probably be pretty easy to implement into the current code, but wordwrap is a bear, and I doubt it will happen anytime soon.
Anyway, like Social asked, are you writing this yourself now, or do you still need help?
Well,
Thanks anyway Social,
That is not what I need.Please re-read my post.
I have played with BF blender and done all the research I need. I have done exactly what you have stated, and I still dont get the results I want.
it can only output solid text… and I am not going to go and manually add the effects I need.
Time is money, I have an automated way to make text and that is what I want to use.
BFblender is a hacked version of a discontinued true type tool called the glyph viewer.
Blendenzo did not make it,he hacked St5150’s script to be 512x512 like I requested. (Thanks again man!)
There is source code on the blender.org site of the original BSD port
that I am sure I could compile into Linux or whatever.
but that is not what I want to do.
I can do the above mentioned with logic bricks and the animation system, just not very efficiently…
Any more talk about BFblender is totally off topic and will be regarded as disruptive chatter.
The results are completely undesirable for me right now.
My projects demand nice crisp text, with different effects.
I want to get something totally different, and I am wiling to pay for it.
Anyways, I need to have something soon
and my offer is still open to anyone who wants to take it.
Hey blendenzo!
Thanks for the reply… I was typing the other post when you posted yours…
Yea! I still need some help… thanks man
I see, you meant your batch scripts, not the Python scripts. This is where Social and I were getting confused earlier.
Well, I think I’ve thought up a system that could work. I’ll PM you and ask for the details I need.
Thank you.
Yea!
I dont know python verry well.
I can do a few of the hello world scripts, but that is about it.
The script dose not have to make the text in real time either,
It would be desireable, but not a requirement…
I would be happy with a system I feed raw text into, and blender poops out sheets with the charictors properly UV mapped…
I would also like to add, that my matrix is going to be alot bigger than the ones above…
I would like to make it 144 charictors, so other people from around the world can use it too for special key’s. I am going to make it more along the unicode standards (I think they might use 288 charictors).
Cool!
The position is filled!
We are going to have a nice system in a few days from now, I have a nice prototype here.
Man it is totally different than the way I was thinking, but it is efficient.
I will release a few of my personnel fonts with this package as well, so people have something legal to start with.
thanks again everyone!
we should have everything done and tested in a week from now, when we release it.
Great work blendenzo, looking forward to seeing what you did.
Who, me? Nope. Somebody else submitted an impressive working example apparently. I’m just as interested in seeing how it works as you are.
Wow, really, who is it p00f?
Mystery guy, ha, this will be interesting.
Yea, I dont do requests.
I have taken enough Troll bait for one day.
you can just wait politely like everyone else
Lol, way to steal my line.
Anyway, I don’t see any “Troll bait” in this forum. Is there anything I said in this thread that offended you? Please say what because I’m a little confused by this. I thought I was helping.
It is a good line…
I just borrowed it on a no-return basis 
first time I heard it was in heartbreak ridge I think…
I love eastwood movies