Is there a way to reduce text2path output to a single path?

[gagemw]

Text2path's make_paths_from_entity decomposes single line fonts into inner and outer paths, is there an elegant way to recombine those paths, or otherwise decompose text into a single path that can be used to draw line based stick text? (text with no internal area)

@mozman

[mozman]

The Path class deliberately does not support a moveto command to keep the implementation simple, therefore it can not represent multiple paths as a single object. Matplotlib and PyQt paths do support the moveto command and can represent multiple paths in a single object.

The ezdxf.path.to_matplotlib() function combines multiple ezdxf.path,Path objects into a single Matplotlib.path.Path object.

The ezdxf.path.to_qpainter_path() function combines multiple ezdxf.path,Path objects into a single PyQt5.QtGui.QPainterPath object.

[mozman]

I think I'll add the moveto command to the Path class. This will simplify and unify the processing of the HATCH entity that is a multi-path object and therefore needs a special treatment without the moveto command.

[mozman]

In the current unreleased version v0.16.4 is a new ezdxf.path.to_multi_path() function, which merges all given paths into a single Path object. But there is no separation of letters possible, because the underlying font rendering tool Matplotlib TextPath() returns all given letters of a string in a single Matplotlib Path() object. There are tools to detect nested paths in the ezdxf.path.nesting module to create HATCH entities, but separated parts of a letter like "i" are also always separated Path objects.

Added new functions text2path.make_path_from_str() and text2path.make_path_from_entity() which return a multi-path object.