Szymon Kaliski

SDFSheets

SDFSheets is an experimental spreadsheet interface for working with Signed Distance Functions ↗. It's a continuation of exploring my interests in SDFs (SDF-UI, hiccup-sdf), spreadsheet-like interfaces (Protoboard) and Computational DAGs.

This project was a result of a nerd snipe ↗ from Avi Bryant ↗ who worked on a pretty similar exploration called Loglo ↗.

If you want to play around with SDFSheets, check out the live demo ↗.

This prototype provides a couple of very basic tools — a circle and a box, a way to translate and rotate the SDF, and CSG-like operations: union, subtract, and intersect:

You can also build your own SDFs from scratch by calling sdf() with a custom callback:

As usual, this is just a prototype, and there's a bunch of obvious improvements that could be made:

• the usual spreadsheet niceties:
  • click on another cell to insert a reference
  • smart references that work with copy-paste
  • referencing other cells by B2 instead of $("B2")
• support for ranges, so we can sdf.union(B2:B5)
• autocomplete for the code input

Backlinks

1. 2023-07-03Live-Coding Notebooks, SDF Spreadsheets, and a DIY Pen Plotter²