Hi all - Workflow question. I bought a particular font set I needed for my first project, a replica of the National Forest signs for our local scout troop.
I’m getting stuck though finding a software package that will read the font file and convert it to the proper path for cutting.
This is the text in question, rendered in MS Word on my Mac
As a last resort, I loaded the font into my Windows VM that runs the EstlCAM. It worked, sort of. Each letter rendered, but not flowed together like in the first image, no matter how much I drove character spacing.
Anyone dabble in this area with thoughts or best practices?
It looks you are writing the whole thing with Caps!lock on
. Capital leters will not be attached one and the other. Try lightburn it will make your live easier to work with the text then you can expor the dxf files
In the example photos, look at #9 it shows all caps are individual, the only linked ones are tle lower ones
I told you to use lightburn only for the ease of use. I use the text stuff in the cad/cam i use: Vectric Aspire, but you can perfectly do it inside Inkscape (thats how i did things at the beginning)
Thanks Cesar - There was no re-typing. That was a ctrl-c ctrl-v from Word to Inkscape that changed from cursive to all caps.
I think it is a weird Mac font thing, because the image that pastes in inkscape is from the font family, but wasn’t the one I had in word.
Like I hinted, very weird/unique workflow issue, so appreciate the brainstorm of other ideas. I did make progress taking the word screenshot and tracing a path in inkscape. But long term that’s not sustainable if I want to do anything other than straight lines.
I"ll give LightBurn a try. Don’t have the budget right now for Vectric products, but I have used them in the past and they are great.
You can install the font and just type what you need inside Inkscape, you do t need to copy it
The free trial of lightburn will work for editing what you need and export it to be used with estlcam
in Rhino, do you type the letters with Text or with TextObject. if you type it with TextObject, do you select curves or solids or surfaces. I often use Forte
How did you install the font on MacOS? Is it visible in the ‘Font Book’ application? And have you restarted Inkscape since you installed?
As far as exporting to EstlCAM, you’ll probably want to modify your DXF/SVG in Inkscape to export the text as paths, not text objects. I’m on my phone so can’t send actual screenshots, but here’s a website describing how to do that: Inkscape Text to Path: Step by Step
The other solutions listed here, including Lightburn should do the job. But if, for some reason, they fail, you can capture the text as an image and trace the image. Inkscape and Lightburn both do a good job of tracing bitmap images, and there are a zillion websites for converting bitmaps to SVGs. To get the best results, render the text large.
