OpenSCAD User Manual/Text

The text module creates text as a 2D geometric object, using fonts installed on the local system or provided as separate font file.

[Note: Requires version 2015.03]

Parameters

text: String. The text to generate.

size: Decimal. The generated text has an ascent (height above the baseline) of approximately the given value. Default is 10. Different fonts can vary somewhat and may not fill the size specified exactly, typically they render slightly smaller. On a metric system a size of 25.4 (1" imperial) will correspond to 100pt ⇒ a 12pt font size would be 12×0.254 for metric conversion or 0.12 in imperial.

font: String. The name of the font that should be used. This is not the name of the font file, but the logical font name (internally handled by the fontconfig library). This can also include a style parameter, see below. A list of installed fonts & styles can be obtained using the font list dialog (Help -> Font List).

halign: String. The horizontal alignment for the text. Possible values are "left", "center" and "right". Default is "left".

valign: String. The vertical alignment for the text. Possible values are "top", "center", "baseline" and "bottom". Default is "baseline".

spacing: Decimal. Factor to increase/decrease the character spacing. The default value of 1 results in the normal spacing for the font, giving a value greater than 1 causes the letters to be spaced further apart.

direction: String. Direction of the text flow. Possible values are "ltr" (left-to-right), "rtl" (right-to-left), "ttb" (top-to-bottom) and "btt" (bottom-to-top). Default is "ltr".

language: String. The language of the text (e.g., "en", "ar", "ch"). Default is "en".

script: String. The script of the text (e.g., "latin", "arabic", "hani"). Default is "latin".

$fn: used for subdividing the curved path segments provided by freetype

Example

Example 1: Result.

text("OpenSCAD");

Notes

To allow specification of particular Unicode characters, you can specify them in a string with the following escape codes;

\x03 - hex char-value (only hex values from 01 to 7f are supported)
\u0123 - Unicode char with 4 hexadecimal digits (note: lowercase \u)
\U012345 - Unicode char with 6 hexadecimal digits (note: uppercase \U)

The null character (NUL) is mapped to the space character (SP).

 assert(version() == [2019, 5, 0]);
 assert(ord(" ") == 32);
 assert(ord("\x00") == 32);
 assert(ord("\u0000") == 32);
 assert(ord("\U000000") == 32);

Example

t="\u20AC10 \u263A"; // 10 euro and a smilie

Using Fonts & Styles

Fonts are specified by their logical font name; in addition a style parameter can be added to select a specific font style like "bold" or "italic", such as:

font="Liberation Sans:style=Bold Italic"

The font list dialog (available under Help > Font List) shows the font name and the font style for each available font. For reference, the dialog also displays the location of the font file. You can drag a font in the font list, into the editor window to use in the text() statement.

OpenSCAD font list dialog

OpenSCAD includes the fonts Liberation Mono, Liberation Sans, and Liberation Serif. Hence, as fonts in general differ by platform type, use of these included fonts is likely to be portable across platforms.

For common/casual text usage, the specification of one of these fonts is recommended for this reason. Liberation Sans is the default font to encourage this.

In addition to the installed fonts ( for windows only fonts installed as admin for all users ), it's possible to add project specific font files. Supported font file formats are TrueType Fonts (*.ttf) and OpenType Fonts (*.otf). The files need to be registered with use<>.

 use <ttf/paratype-serif/PTF55F.ttf>

After the registration, the font is listed in the font list dialog, so in case logical name of a font is unknown, it can be looked up as it was registered.

OpenSCAD uses fontconfig to find and manage fonts, so it's possible to list the system configured fonts on command line using the fontconfig tools in a format similar to the GUI dialog.

$ fc-list -f "%-60{{%{family[0]}%{:style[0]=}}}%{file}\n" | sort

...
Liberation Mono:style=Bold Italic /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation2/LiberationMono-BoldItalic.ttf
Liberation Mono:style=Bold        /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation2/LiberationMono-Bold.ttf
Liberation Mono:style=Italic      /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation2/LiberationMono-Italic.ttf
Liberation Mono:style=Regular     /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation2/LiberationMono-Regular.ttf
...

Under Windows, fonts are stored in the Windows Registry. To get a file with the font file names, use the command:

reg query "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts" /s > List_Fonts_Windows.txt

Example

Example 2: Result.

 square(10);
 
 translate([15, 15]) {
   text("OpenSCAD", font = "Liberation Sans");
 }
 
 translate([15, 0]) {
   text("OpenSCAD", font = "Liberation Sans:style=Bold Italic");
 }

Alignment

Vertical alignment

top: The text is aligned with the top of the bounding box at the given Y coordinate.

center: The text is aligned with the center of the bounding box at the given Y coordinate.

baseline: The text is aligned with the font baseline at the given Y coordinate. This is the default.

bottom: The text is aligned with the bottom of the bounding box at the given Y coordinate.

OpenSCAD vertical text alignment

 text = "Align";
 font = "Liberation Sans";
 
 valign = [
   [  0, "top"],
   [ 40, "center"],
   [ 75, "baseline"],
   [110, "bottom"]
 ];
 
 for (a = valign) {
   translate([10, 120 - a[0], 0]) {
     color("red") cube([135, 1, 0.1]);
     color("blue") cube([1, 20, 0.1]);
     linear_extrude(height = 0.5) {
       text(text = str(text,"_",a[1]), font = font, size = 20, valign = a[1]);
     }
   }
 }

Multi line text is not supported with `text()` but translating each line size × .72 will result in a leading (line spaceing) of 1 em (em= fonts body height or points). 20% (× 1.2) may be added.

Horizontal alignment

left: The text is aligned with the left side of the bounding box at the given X coordinate. This is the default.

center: The text is aligned with the center of the bounding box at the given X coordinate.

right: The text is aligned with the right of the bounding box at the given X coordinate.

OpenSCAD horizontal text alignment

 text = "Align";
 font = "Liberation Sans";
 
 halign = [
   [10, "left"],
   [50, "center"],
   [90, "right"]
 ];
 
 for (a = halign) {
   translate([140, a[0], 0]) {
     color("red") cube([115, 2,0.1]);
     color("blue") cube([2, 20,0.1]);
     linear_extrude(height = 0.5) {
       text(text = str(text,"_",a[1]), font = font, size = 20, halign = a[1]);
     }
   }
 }

3D text

Text can be changed from a 2 dimensional object into a 3D object by using the linear_extrude function.

//3d Text Example
linear_extrude(4)
    text("Text");

3D text example