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Affine Font Indeed

This script will take text such as

HELLO
WORLD

and calculates a bunch of affine transforms to turn this into a fractal. The output is a .flame file used in Apophysis and similar fractal flame editors.

When loaded into Apophysis, the flame will look something like this. You can tweak the parameters when done.

Something

Installation

Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install the required packages

Usage

./affine_font_indeed.py [-b/--block-padding] <fname> <flame_name> <text>

Where:

  • fname is the filename of the output file. For example output/hello.flame
  • flame_name is a name for the fractal inside the flame file.
  • text is the desired text. If you want multiple lines of text, use literal newlines. For example, in bash $'hello\nworld'. Note that the text will be converted to uppercase and special characters will be turned into the padding character
  • -b/--block-padding If specified, strings will be padded to the same width with █ instead of . This makes the fractal more solid-looking

Example commands

# This generates the example image above
./affine_font_indeed.py output/hello.flame Hello $'Hello\nWorld'

# The first line is shorter than the second. Use a padding character
# so the fractal has less holes
./affine_font_indeed.py output/birthday.flame "Happy Birthday" $'Happy\Birthday'

Notes

  • This fractal is a generalization of the "COKE" fractal in Fractals Everwhere, 2nd Ed. by Michael F. Barnsley. The fractal appears as Figure III.73 on page 98.
  • Right now, this script only supports the characters A-Z. I may add some special characters on an ad-hoc basis. I do not plan to expand to lowercase or non-English characters. If you want to contribute more characters, please let me know.
  • The script randomizes colors for the xforms automatically. If you need a different pallete or evenly-spaced colors, do this in Apophysis

Gallery

Here is an example that shows what padding characters look like after generating with the --block-padding option and rendering in Apo Birthday

Here is the same example without --block-padding. Note that the holes in the text are propagated into evey stroke. This may or may not be desireable. No Padding

Here is the full fractal alphabet as of 2018-08-29: Alphabet

How it Works

Here is a flowchart of how data flows through the program:

Data Flow

  1. The user enters the desired text such as Hello\nWorld along with other command line arguments
  2. The desired text is pre-processed into a Text object. This splits the string into multiple lines and pads out the text. The Text object keeps track of the grid of characters.
  3. The font geometry is loaded from the YAML file. This is represented by a Font object
  4. From this Font object, the script extracts a list of what characters are currently supported by the font, the "alphabet"
  5. The alphabet is used to "sanitize" the Text object. Any character that is not in the alphabet are replaced by the padding character
  6. The Text and Font objects are used to construct a Layout object. This object handles positioning the letters in the text in "world space" coordinates"
  7. The Layout calculates a bounding box for the text in world space. It also computes the position of every letter in the text in world space
  8. This geometry data is passed to an AffineFinder to get a list of transforms (of class XForm). For the math behind this, see below
  9. These XForms are passed through a FlameWriter. This renders an XML .flame file in the format Apophysis uses
  10. The rendered .flame file is written to disk

Solving for Affine Transforms

Affine transformations used for this font are of the form

AX + b = X'

More specifically, we want to map a large triangle (the bounding box of the text) onto a smaller triangle (one of the "strokes" in the lettering). Thus, we have a matrix equation like this:

Note: Triangles look like they appear in Apophysis:

Y
|
|
|
O----X


[a b] * [Ox Xx Yx] + [e] = [Ox' Xx' Yx']
[c d]   [Oy Xy Yy]   [f]   [Oy' Xy' Yy']
 
 A    *     X      +  b  =   X'
 
 2x2       2x3       2x1       2x3
      (bounding box)        (stroke)

Note that we can add a row of 1s to express this equation more concisely as follows:

[a b e] * [Ox Xx Yx] = [Ox' Xx' Yx']
[c d f]   [Oy Xy Yy]   [Oy' Xy' Yy'] 
          [ 1  1  1]

 [A b]  *    [X]     =    X'
             [1]

 2x3        3x3            2x3

Now, we want to solve for the leftmost matrix. I did this by transposing the equation first

([A b] * [X]).T = X'.T
         [1]

([X]).T * [A b].T = X'.T
 [1]

[X.T 1] * [A.T] = X'.T
          [b.T]

Let's expand that last line to be more clear

[Ox Oy 1] * [a c] = [Ox' Oy']
[Xx Xy 1]   [b d]   [Xx' Xy']
[Yx Yy 1]   [e f]   [Yx' Yy']

Now all that's left is to let Numpy solve this equation for the parameters a, b, c, d, e and f.

Notes on Apophysis Format

.flame files stores these parameters in a different order and in a slightly different coordinate system. Using my notation above, the coefficients are written in the following format:

coefs="a -c -b d e -f"

I am still not entirely sure why the c and b coefficients are negated. This is more than a a simple y-up vs y-down confusion.

This script compensates for these negations so things show up correctly in Apophysis