Vinyl Lettering Calculator Tool.

[Nik Grey]

.. Building my CC:

 

I will be offering Vinyl Lettering amongst other things and need a tool which allows the customer to enter desired Text, Size, Colour etc - show a price and send it to the cart.

 

I have seen this, or variations of it around and I think on CC websites - here's an example.

 

This is going to be crucial to me as I don't want people to have to email me with details.. (Hope I am not asking the Earth here)

 

I have had a look in the Third party area but there isn't that much for V5 yet.

 

Can anybody help ?

 

 

... a little later:

I got quite excited a moment ago as I stumbled across another tool I need - 'Image Uploader' but it seems the developer has gone missing and the product is no longer for sale

 

Quick update: I contacted Semperfi who got back to me quickly, sent him my requirements. will keep you posted.

[Al Brookbanks]

Hi Nik, Did you have any progress with this? In CubeCart you can set a product option to be a text field to allow text input. That would be a good starting point. 

[Nik Grey]

I have a developer working on this, he said it would take a month so I am no further at all with my website.

Thats ok at the moment as I am being bombarded with work just from what I show on social networks but I do need my cubecart running soon.

I also have an image uploader job after this.. If he gives me what I need this time.

[Al Brookbanks]

Great its good to hear that progress is being made. 

[Nik Grey]

ok, we are making progress now (Since it is coming to the end of the 30 days quoted for the job)..lol.

 

There is something we need to work out though, as my customer inputs characters, and sets the size of font required we need to show the overall height and width of the finished sign - hmm, Is there a standard width between letters ? something we can work to ?

 

The only other way is for me to cut various signs and take measurements but that would take forever - is there a standard way of working that out I wonder?

 

Or I could just copy the output from here.

[Dirty Butter]

Would there be any specs with the lettering machine that would be of help? Since different letters have different spacing in most fonts - are you limiting the fonts available? If it only needs to be approximate, I asked for help getting a text box to match a given number of characters. I'll find that thread and add the link. Not sure this would be of any help, but here it is:

 

[Nik Grey]

I see what you are trying to do there. I don't want to limit my available fonts although there will be a limit to the number - I certainly don't want to limit to Monotype.

 

I suppose the question I am asking here is:

 

Does anybody know if there is a way of calculating the width of a collection of characters in a certain font?

[bsmither]

Not having made a study of TrueType technology, what I can guess-timate is that the basic width of a string of characters is:

 

SUM::[ P( (b_xk_xX)_n + (b_xk_xX + aK_i:i+1)_i ) ]

_{i = 0 to n-1}

 

where the answer is the summation of:

 

P = a scaling factor based on the points the font is displayed at, 72 points is one inch, 12 points is 1/6 inch giving 6 lines to the inch. So, a 24 point font will be twice as wide as a 12 point font.

 

b_x = any additional (positive or negative) variation in width for this character.

 

k_x = the actual width of the character as designed by the foundry.

 

X = the actual character at this position in the string.

 

()_n = the last character in the string because it does not include what follows.

 

K = the built-in 'kerning' between this character and the character next in the string, as designed by the foundry. Called kerning-pairs.

 

a = any additional (positive or negative) kerning between this character and the next.

 

()_i = the current character in the string.

 

Here's the hard part -- locating this data for any given font.

 

I found this article while googling.