Cutting text into thin plastic

[mhotchin (Michael Hotchin)]

For a font that works pretty well using a ‘No Offset’ contour, I have had good luck with the ‘Zniko’ font.

It’s not actually a single line font, it’s just super super skinny. But, that makes it a ‘normal’ font, so it works well in CC.

Just pick an endmill with a diameter that would look good for the height of the font you are carving, then do a No Offset contour on it.

See here for an example of text that is about 1/4" tall, carved with a 1mm endmill:

Fonts for small letters

Another approach is to use a single line (‘stick’) font, and use a small endmill. Good stick font seem to be hard to find, and most software doesn’t work well with then because they don’t have an enclosed area. BUT, a font I have used in the past that ‘emulates’ a stick font is the oddly named ZNiko font, available here: It’s actually an extremely narrow font, so you can just do a contour cut on it using an endmill and it looks like a stick font. Here is a dog show prize I made - the ‘bone’…