Hello! Philip with Shuman Projects here
and today we're going to talk about fonts and the Shaper Origin. One of the
reasons I was really excited to get a CNC was be able to make precision cuts
for making signs, fonts, things like that. It's pretty easy once you get started
but there are a few tricks to make sure your SVG is set up for Origin to be able
to cut fonts. We are going to walk through that today and get you started. So first
off is selecting your font. One of the great resources that I use a
lot is Google Fonts at fonts.google.com You can come in here, put the
text the year actually trying to use. Use the filters that they have to try and
find a font that works best for your application. There's a ton of filters for
different types of fonts, different sizes, different scales, different weights, and
so you can use the filters that they have to try and narrow down something
for your application. One of the nice things about Google Fonts is that many
if not all of the fonts are available with very open licenses for you to be
able to use in your own personal and/or commercial applications. So check out the
license for each font that you find. For this example we're going to pick a
script font because that's going to demonstrate a number of the things that
we actually have to do to make sure our font is set up correctly for Origin. So
I've got one I like here. I'm going to go go ahead and download it to my computer.
Save it on the on the hard drive someplace.
You can download multiple fonts it at once and Google Fonts will zip them all
together. Once you have it on your hard drive, you want to extract that zip
file so that you have the fonts locally. For Inkscape, which is what we're
going to use today, you want to make sure that that font is installed as a system
font, not just as a user so you want to right-click and install for all users.
That will make sure that that font is available for Inkscape to use. So we're
going to use Inkscape. It is a free vector drawing tool. You can use other vector
drawing tools like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, things like that, that are
going to produce that SVG file. Inkscape is nice. It's free. There are a lot of
tutorials online. So once you have Inkscape downloaded
and installed, we're going to set up our file. I'm here in the U.S., so I'm using
inches but you can use millimeters as well, but you want to have your display
units and your actual size of your document in the consistent units whether
it's inches or millimeters. We're going to do 12 inches by 12 inches for this
example. So now it's time to select our font. So we go to the font tool, click,
type in the text that we actually are going to want to route out with the
Shaper. Select your text, find the font that you've downloaded or installed that you want to cut, and then apply. You can change the size of the font in a
couple ways: one you can use the point font to be able to select it or the
other thing you could do is just drag the whole object and scale it as well. So right now our our text here is
still a font object in Inkscape. I'm going to save a copy so you can see what
this looks like on Origin. This is not going to work if you bring it in just like
this. It's not vector. There is nothing that Origin can actually route. So we are
going to save it as just a font only. This is nice and I do this for my files I'm
actually working with so I can go back and adjust the text later if I want, but
what we need to do is we actually need to take that font object and convert it
to a path a path. A path in a vector drawing tool actually has different
points that dictate where the lines are going to go, where the curves are, how
sharp the radiuses are. So now that you actually have your font as a path, we are
going save that off as a path. If you have a regular font that has no
overlapping letters, that's fine for Origin. With this example, because it's a
script and you see some of those letters actually overlap with each other, that
becomes a problem when we want to go do an outline. I'm going show you
what that looks like as well. So what I'm gonna do here is actually ungroup it and
then take each letter individually that overlap and do a union. That is going to
create one single object, one single path and so if I do an outline cut or an
outline trace, each of those letters aren't being treated as an individual
letter, just as one single path all together. So we will do that for the second word.
Now you can see if I edit it as a path, it's all one piece and there isn't
any problem with the other letters. We will save that out as this is the one I'm
actually going to cut and we'll see what that looks like here in a minute. All right, so the first one I'm going to
load is the one that's just a font. Inkscape can open it. It looks the same.
You actually see here in Shaper it has my text, but it can't load it in it
wasn't the right format because Shaper has no concept of TrueType fonts from Windows.
Now we are going to load the second one which is the individual letters. You can
already start to see the tails of some of those letters that overlap with each
other are actually going to be a problem when we go to cut. So if I wanted to
trace it, those who go over. If I want to do to an outline cut, I would actually
have pieces missing out of each of those. So for any fonts that overlap, this is
not a good way to go. So finally what we'll do, this is the one where the path
was unioned and so each thing is one contiguous path. Now you can see there
isn't any overlapping letters, everything looks like it's one single path.
If I were to cut on the outline, you actually see that everything's going to be one piece and if I wanted to do an engraving, I
could actually do an online cut and just follow that path around for that whole word. Well I hope this was helpful for you.
Make sure you share the projects you're working on.
We love to see what you're doing. Thanks and we will see in the next one!
