Straighten UV Vertices Maintaining Relative Distance I'm creating long, winding strips as in the illustration below and need to make the edges of the UV map straight at the edges of the grid, so that the texture stretches across its width once and repeats height-wise.

I've been going about it in a time-consuming fashion, rotating the windy part at each joint until it's straight, then scaling all the side-by-side pairs to zero on the Y axis as well as each whole side of the ladder on the X. Other than being manually tedious, this also loses the relative length of each segment.

How might one efficiently "unwind" the UV map of such a strip while maintaining the segment lengths so that a texture will look uniformly accurate across its length?

Thanks.
You could try to start with a long rectangle in the 3D view (imagine your shape made flat), then use a curve modifier to make it similar to your picture. Doing that the shape stays straight and allows you to make the UV part straight too (as long as the modifier is not applied).