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Reverse "Text to Curves"


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Well, this is one of those "utopic" requests but one that would help a lot, if possible to implement.

We can currently convert text to curves.

But, what if we have a file that has text in curves format and we need to edit it?

This can happen by accident (saving over a file, after converting the text to curves), opening an older file or opening a document from the net or from someone else.

So, it would be great to have a feature that would compare the curves of a text with the outline of the installed fonts and if matched (providing a threshold and a success rate) would revert the text back to editable text and even provide a suggestion about what font was used (or the closest one).

It would be a kind of outline-curve based OCR.

I guess no other application has this ability.

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I guess no other application has this ability.

 

 

Because it sounds like a total nightmare.   :P

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Actually, what could be done is that at the time of the type to path conversion, the text object could be 'stored' as hidden data for the path group in some way as to have it available if you change your mind, so you could always revert to the original text, this obviously should happen behind the scenes, and not activated by the user.

Or even better, maybe have a live 'convert to path' filter to manipulate the path and keep the text attributes 'live' to have both worlds.

That would be great :)

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I know all about whatthefont :-)
I use it l a alot. But that only provides me with the best candidate for the font family used. It will not OCR anything.

Performing an optical OCR seems a lot more complex because the engine does not know in advance what type of characters (serifed, non-serifed, slanted, bold, etc) it will be recognizing.

Having the outlines available, it would be much easier (not easy, but easier).

And the outlines are available, on the installed fonts.

 

But the suggestion by mbuchicio sounds feasible and powerful.

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