First off, you can use any font which you can install on your machine — we don’t limit this (but see below for the gory technical details).
There really shouldn’t be an optimization needed specifically for V Carving — the whole point is that it takes a 2D area and then creates a 3D path which will cut it. Problems which we have seen:
- incorrect font construction — for fonts especially the path winding needs to be correct (counter-clockwise for the outermost, clockwise for the next and alternating)
- wrong kerning / spacing — this is probably a failing of the font toolkit which we are using — not helped by not providing any nice interface options for adjusting that — I really miss Glenn Reid’s TouchType.app (and I’m never forgiving Adobe for buying it out and then losing the source code).
- complex paths caused by conversion of quadratic B-splines and Bézier curves to polylines
I doubt that there will be a subscription option — we (at least I) believe that software should be licensed in perpetuity for a given version and there ought not be the option of “takebacks” 'cause someone didn’t make a payment (every time cloud licensing is described to me it sounds like a protection racket / extortion scheme — when I say that, I say it as an individual, not a representative of Carbide 3D)
I believe that what you really want are monoline fonts — since we support cutting of open toolpaths, that would be an option, but it would need to be explicitly encoded into the app as a feature, since the text toolkit which we use only supports native machine outline fonts, which for Mac OS X and Windows are PostScript Type 1, TrueType, and OpenType.
One free option for monoline fonts is the “Hershey” fonts — these are supported in Inkscape, and it ought to be possible to save them into an SVG and then cut them: Shapeoko CNC Router, Rigid, Accurate, Reliable, and Affordable — I find the monoline thickness aesthetically monotonous.
A commercial option, which comes in two forms is listed at: Shapeoko CNC Router, Rigid, Accurate, Reliable, and Affordable
as noted at the link above:
Universal font version works, but is not actually single line.
With all that said, there is another commercial option — as noted above, we convert paths into polylines for CAM, which is neither optimal, nor elegant (in the sense of scientifically/mathematically correct) — Vectric V Carve and Aspire seem to preserve curves and generate toolpaths which have G2/G3 arcs, which are faster and more efficient. If you’re not averse to licensing commercial software, I can recommend that (again, as an individual, not a Carbide 3D employee).