[Ann] A Monoline Text Drawing Script

Spurred into action by an ongoing discussion at Typophile: Technical Q: Monoline fonts, I decided to have a go at writing a Javascript. I'm pretty pleased with the result; perhaps it's of interest for the technical illustration drawers among you!

Enjoy.

Here is a link to the script I wrote for Illustrator CS4 (it might or might not work for any other version): monolinetext.v1.0.zip. It's a Javascript for Illustrator, and you can put it into the regular Illustrator Scripts folder to see it appear in the "Scripts" menu, or somewhere else (and you'd have to browse for it each time).

It shows a little tiny dialog (on which I spend most of the time) where you can enter a size in "points" (relative to the 29 units high Hershey characters) and enter some text. Use Shift+Enter to insert a 'Hard Return', or enter as much text as you want. The text is then drawn out in monoline characters in the center of the screen.

The script is intelligent, in that you can change a previously drawn text by simply selecting it and running the script. Note, however, that stuff like manual scaling and changed attributes (stroke width, color) will be lost. If that's important to you, I might look into it ...

It only supports a small subset of the Hershey Simplex set -- just ASCII, space up to tilde. (And it draws traditional K shapes.)