CarbideCreate not honoring text height setting?!

[172pilot (Steve Jones)]

I posted this on the shapeoko.com forum, but thought I’d also try here, in case there’s a different audience…

I’m trying to make some basic signs, with text, and I’m trying to get 2 lines of text to be the same font size on the sign… I create one line, then the other, and set the text height to exactly the same number, and they end up completely different sizes. What could I possibly be doing wrong? It doesn’t happen all the time, but I can’t figure out what is triggering it. If I can, I’ll attach an example, Tall Grass Meadow Loop Trails.nc (92.6 KB)
and it does happen on other files… The first line says “Tall Grass Meadow” and if I set the width to perfectly fit my board, it shows the height of 1.259, so I add the second line: Loop Trails, and manually set the height to 1.259, but the text remains smaller, even though there’s plenty of room for it to be the same size as the top line…

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated… I’m a beginner on this!!
-Steve

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

The problem is, rather than measuring the text’s em square derived bounding box as most programs do, Carbide Create measures the physical extent of the outline of the text as set.

You can see this by setting two different text blocks. Set one to a period, set the other to be a capital letter and a period — note the perceived size difference.

It would be better to set the text in Inkscape or some other vector editor, then convert it to paths, then save as an SVG and import that into Carbide Create.

[172pilot (Steve Jones)]

Thanks… I think I see what’s going on…
To fix this in Carbide Create, it almost seems like there would have to be a third metric of “Point size” to set size with, since that would give you a consistent letter size, and then force a different height/width.

I can see that in cases where there’s only one line of text, and a specific bounded box that you’re trying to keep the text inside, that the way it works now is great, but this makes ANY project with two separate text boxes in which you want to use a consistent font size to be extremely difficult to get exact, but I think I found a way…

I went back and looked at the sign I was using as a test:
Line 1: Tall Grass Meadow
Line 2: Loop Trails

I had previously used the first (longer) line, and set the width to 15" to achieve maximum font size, which gave me height of 1.259 with the particular font I used. Trying to set line 2 to height of 1.259 gave me obviously smaller characters.

It seems that the descender “p” in the second line is what is making it measure from the bottom of the p to the top of the tallest letter (T or L) to determine the height, which causes line 2’s font size to scale smaller. I predicted that removing the lower case p, and just making it “Loo Trails” as a test would mean that with no descender in either line, and the tallest characters in each line being the same height, that they would be the same. I first expected that since I had previously set the height, the letters would get bigger and match the first line when I made the change, but what it did instead is to display the NEW height of the line without the descender, which is 1.101.
This was unexpected, but that’s OK - I was able to then set the height to the desired 1.259, verify that it now matched the first line, then add the “p” back in, and it kept the proper text size, and displayed the height of line 2 as 1.440.

I think this might be hard to understand in writing, and it’s more complex than it should be, but it’s a way to get around this problem. I’ll try to make a video demonstrating it, and come back here to post it as an example, because in my searches, I’ve seen other people with the same question / problem.

Thanks for your help… I THINK it makes sense now!!

-Steve