I often engrave tiny lettering on my parts with a itsy bitsy ball mill. In this case, any normal font will leave a peak between 2 lines unless I use an ungodly stepover. To remedy this, I have been using normal fonts and editing the vector nodes as to eliminate any gap.
If anyone else here engraves text with no offset, I would love to know any tips or tricks <3
Here is an example using normal text without my cleaning by removing gaps, you can see the text looks nasty fat, but it is really not that bad. except the kerning lmao
Wafflin’ -
Last time I did this, instead of just doing the few words I was working with; I took the gap out of the whole alphabet in carbide create, then took the vectors into inkscape, I used their built in text editor which is where my familiarity with the program begins to show it’s blind spots. At this point I found I needed to take the font or text thing I made in inkscape to a program by the name, “font forge”, however, I could not get my files to import to that program. I must admit my patience was thin at this point and I just ran my old method.
I like to use “Single Line Fonts”, @WillAdams will warn you that they don’t work, I disagree.
With single line fonts there is no width to the text, it’s just a single path for your bit to follow. Use a no-offset contour toolpath, and let your bit selection dictate the resulting width. I have not tried it on metal, but on wood and plastic I’ve used V bits and very shallow cut depth to get a very fine “scratch”, or small downcut bits to get a thicker line.
If I understood your question, I think this is basically what you are doing just without needing the vector editing.
It’s not that they don’t work, it’s that they’re not really single line.
TrueType and OpenType fonts are supposed to be closed, and won’t validate if open, so instead, what is done is very narrow glyphs are drawn, which causes the tool to double back.
“Real” single line fonts are available in specialty tools such as the “Hershey” fonts for which there is a plug-in for Inkscape:
A work-around is to use a suitably sized tool and inset an amount which the font design requires (note that this creates the same sort of distorted vector appearance as the fonts sold as “single line”)
