The text generator is just a small basic program that generates 3 (short) lines of text as a .thr file for the sisyphus table.

Requirements:

1) You need to have small basic installed on your system.  (download from microsoft for free) 
2) You need to put the Text Gnerator.sb file and the abc.txt file in the same place (directory)
3) YOu open the .sb file and hit run - it generates .thr files in the same directory as the program and abc.txt


The program "builds" each line of text at a time - and you are limited in space by the table geometry.  So the top and bottom line
are the same length and the middle line is slightly longer.  The characters you choose set the length - so Capitals consume more space.


Legal Characters are a-z, A-Z and 0-9 and the space character.  Any other input will get an "illegal character in the line" message

I separated the data file (abc.txt) from the program to allow the characters to be added or modified.  The abc.txt file is just the 
alphabet starting with space, a-z (connecting at bottom) , space, a-z (connecting at top), A-Z, 0-9.  Since it is cursive writing, I had
to include a set of bottom of top connectors for the small letters (b, o, v and w connect to top in cursive.)  The data file is just an
x,y map of each character and keys on the 0,0.1 start position to separate the individual characters.

On how the program runs - if you are interested - it builds each line you input from the character data base, and then centers it using the
space you didn't use on the line.  After all 3 lines are generated (in x,y coordinates) it rotates by pi/2 (for the table orientation) and then
mirrors the text (because the table mirrors anything you put into it (most people write symmetric images and never notice that artifact)

Then it passes the x,y image to the end part of the program that converts it to polar format (normalizing angles to just be between 0-and 2 pi).
It then goes back and "fixes" the progression of the lines past the 0/ 2 pi line by just adding the angles and compensating when it passes the origin
angle.   Others do that on the fly by "counting" passage of the 0 angle axis.   This makes the ball movement smooth as angles never "jump" more than 
a small amount.  

Finally it addes an "erase" routine as the first 2 lines to clear the table (then adds the angle to all of the points again to make the jumps
smooth.

then it writes the .thr file.