How to Thicken Text for Laser Cutting

hi this is fedo with cuddle and in this video I'm going to answer a question that was submitted about how to thicken a text for when you want to cut it out of acrylic or other materials that might break really easily um so I'm going to show you a couple of ways to do it with text and I'm also going to show you how to do it with other shapes yeah because that can be very useful sometimes so um I think the easiest way to get started say if you want some text uh uh to cut right away is to go to the template section in the cuddle website and then scroll down to check out the connected text template so this is a sort of very streamlined way of like getting a file and uh to be able to use it right away so here I can simply enter whatever text I want I'm just going to type something as an example C fish um and here I get to change just a few things like the font and the size uh and then right here is the uh parameter that we're looking for the thicken option so I simply need to click on it and then scrub to the right uh to get it thicker I think with the default font with Pacifico it might not be as clear why you would need that but like if I select something way thinner revert it you can see how this is so thin that might be super uh breakable if it's made out of acrylic so with some funds it really helps to add that kind of automatic uh thickening or expand and then when you're happy with what you have you can simply hit the blue button right here and then that's it's going to get you an SVG file that you can use uh with your machine um but sometimes you might want to incorporate this in other designs so in that case it's useful to use the codal editor so I'm going to switch my tab over here and so here I have the editor it's a blank canvas and let's say for example I want to put that text inside of a frame so I'm just going to grab a rectangle and stretch it and the first example I'm going to show you is again with connect the text so I'm going to search for Connect it I find that component here I can simply drag it onto the canvas place it where I want it say something like that make this a little bigger and then when I select that text you'll see that uh we are very familiar with the kind of things we can change we can change the font and the size um and then right here is again that thicken option let's try it again with a a different font so I can thicken it right from this uh place so that would be an example in the editor using connected text um but sometimes it's actually useful to expand all text even uh sometimes you don't have it connected or you don't want it to be connected so in that case there is another way to do it so for example if I grab just the regular text element that doesn't connect everything automatically um sometimes it's useful to to expand it so for example let me change the font here something like um something like this font the font is notable so I'm going to type that name notable and so you'll see that when this is selected I have some options to change the size and the alignment and things like that but there is not added expansion um but say if you wanted to expand that or thicken it you can actually add that too you can well selecting that you can go to modify and then there is an option called expand and so that adds the uh the option here to expand it so you'll see I can actually change that number and so this could be useful uh say for a design element where you want the font to be a little bit thicker or or sort of all connected or have an outline like this one one interesting thing that this expand modifier adds is that you can change the way the corners are joined so there's this join option and if I change it to round you'll see how it rounds all the corners uh or where all the lines meet those would be the joints um and that can give you some interesting Design Elements U besides round you can also have a bevel something like that um so you can play around with different fonts and different uh things and of course even after you have applied the expand you can change the font um to check check other things out um perhaps in this case you want to expand it more so that can be useful for letters uh but it can also be useful for other uh regular shapes so for example if I were to have a star um I can apply the same modifier to the star so I'm going to select it I'm going to go to modify I'm going to apply the expand and that helps me you know add some distance from the uh original lines and when I hover over anything I I have applied the expand modifier let make it it bigger um I can see that the original uh thing is in blue that little blue outline that appears and the now expanded one is the green one the green one is the one that's going to you know uh be cut when I send it uh you'll see that the same thing happens when I hover over this one um so I hope that was a good introduction to the expand modifier and uh thank you so much for your questions I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Cuttle

Views: 352

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Id: Tg_XudZ5fJM

Length: 5min 26sec (326 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023