GeomText — Alpha 1.0 test build
===============================

Type a line of text, pick an installed font, get its letterforms as DXF outline
geometry you can cut. The DXF contains closed polylines — the real glyph
contours — not DXF TEXT entities, so it does not matter whether your CAM
software has the font.

Windows 10/11, 64-bit. Nothing to install: one file, no Python needed.


Running it
----------

Double-click GeomText.exe.

Windows will probably stop you the first time: "Windows protected your PC".
That is SmartScreen reacting to an unsigned exe from an unknown developer, not
a virus warning. Click "More info", then "Run anyway".

First launch scans every font on your machine and can take up to a minute with
no window on screen. Later launches reuse the scan and open immediately. Fonts
you install while GeomText is open show up on the next launch, not this one.


Quick start
-----------

1. Type your text.
2. Pick a family and a style.
3. Set the cap height, in inches — that is the height of a capital H, not a
   point size and not the height of the tallest thing in your string.
4. Press Preview. What you see is the vertices the file will contain.
5. Export…


Before you cut
--------------

UNITS ARE INCHES AND THE FILE DOES NOT SAY SO. R12 DXF has no units record. Set
inches when you import; if your CAM software assumes millimetres the part comes
out 25.4x too small and nothing warns you.

The origin is the baseline at the left edge of the ink. Y=0 is the baseline, so
descenders sit at negative Y.

Tolerance is the largest gap, in inches, between the flattened polyline and the
true curve. Coarse 0.005", Normal 0.001", Fine 0.0002". Same number at any cap
height. Use "Show points" zoomed in on one letter to judge which you need.


Known limits in this build
--------------------------

- One line only. No wrapping, alignment, or line spacing.
- Latin / Western European, left to right. Hebrew and Arabic are refused rather
  than exported wrong.
- Characters the font does not contain are dropped, and named in the warning
  strip.
- Overlapping glyphs are not merged. Script fonts and tightly kerned pairs emit
  crossing outlines, which an even-odd CAM reader treats as holes.
- No mirroring for face-down cutting.
- Symbol fonts (Wingdings and friends) are listed with a warning icon. A typed
  "A" gives you whatever that font maps A to.

Check your font's licence before cutting its letterforms into anything you
sell. GeomText does not check for you and cannot.


Reporting a bug
---------------

File it here:

    https://github.com/LemJukes/GeomText-pub/issues 

Search first in case it is already open; otherwise click "New issue". No
GitHub account? Email rob@rjgarner.com with the same information.

Tell me:

1.  What you did — the exact text you typed, the font family and style, the cap
    height, and the tolerance. Those four values reproduce almost everything.
2.  What you expected, and what happened instead. "The O has a flat spot on the
    left" beats "curves look wrong".
3.  Your Windows version, and the version shown by the About button at the
    bottom left of the window.

Attach, when they exist:

- The DXF that came out wrong.
- A screenshot of the window, including the warning strip under the preview.
- The log file:  %LOCALAPPDATA%\GeomText\geomtext.log
  Paste that path into the File Explorer address bar to find it. It records
  crashes and any fonts that failed to load. It is plain text — read it first
  if you would rather not send it.

If GeomText crashed or would not open at all, the log file is the single most
useful thing you can attach, because a windowed exe has nowhere else to put the
error.

Things worth reporting that may not feel like bugs: a font that is installed
but missing from the picker, a font that is listed but fails to load, an export
that takes absurdly long, geometry your CAM software rejects or reads as holes
where it should read solid. Also say if something is merely confusing — the
wording of a control is as fixable as the geometry behind it.