Lesson 3: Inkscape tutorial - Fixing letters with floating centers

when we start modifying files to take to the plasma cutter there are a couple of critical things that we need to do let me show you as i zoom in on the lettering that we just did in the last video one of the problems that you have here is if I start to cut with the plasma cutter it's going to cut on the outside of this letter like this then it's going to come in and cut the inside but you've already cut the outside off that means that Center is going to fall out so if you don't fix that you have a real problem being able to maintain the integrity of the letters themselves you'll notice that the a the d the e the O all would have suspended sections that aren't going to work right so I'm going to show you how to fix that so that you can actually connect them to the outside first thing I need to do as I need to draw myself a rectangle like this and I've got it in white right now it needs to be in black but I'll change it in just a second I want you to notice about check these rectangles you see when I click on it it's got the increase or decrease I've got them locked right now I'm going to unlock it so I can change Rowen change this up or down in or out or diagonal so I can alter them but if I click on it again you notice that the outside changes if I can grab the corner now I can alter the orientation of it by rotation so if I want to fix this section on the D for instance I'm going to rotate that to where it's about parallel with right here I'm going to make it a little bit thinner so I got to click on it again thin the thing up I may have to do a little bit more rotation click on it rotate it back again so that's like that I'm going to zoom in a little bit more because it'll be a little bit easier to deal with you can see what happens here if i zoom it in a little bit better take my selection tool again now this time I'm going to pick it up and I'm going to put it right over the top right here and I'm going to turn it black so what I'm going to do then I continue to alter that that looks relatively good for me it looks like I've got a straight line going along here I've got a D that looks acceptable so now if I hit the shift select loops I forgot one other minor detail before I go on I have to take that block I have to change the path and turn the object path now you see that now that black square is also it has eight nodes so now I'm going to select put the shift key down select the outside one as well and go to path and I need to instead of differencing them I need to Union them now at that point if I pick up the object that is now produced a block that goes across right through there and the D is not the center of it is no longer suspended now there are a few things that you can you can actually go in here and fix you see that line and it's not a big problem right through here where the line isn't perfectly in alignment but if you select your know dual you can actually join these two nodes together and it fixes that completely so now when i zoom back out there's no difference in that section and I did it by fixing the nodes I can do the same thing over here on the e if i zoom in just a little bit easier it becomes better to do that with I select my block tool now in this case since it's already black I'm gonna come in here like that select it about the right size I'm going to fix the curvature that I had on the outside so it's got straight edges I'm going to select with my property selector second click so that I can rotate it until it's about the same angle I'm going to pick it up now I can tell selecting it again and that's too tall so I'm going to reduce it in height try to put it in and that's relatively close I'm going to change the path object to path now if I shift select the outside and Union those two now becomes one and I've created a huge mess I did it intentionally I'm now going to zoom into that go to my node tool and I'm gonna fix my nodes like I showed you on the last one so that now I don't have whoops I got another node up there I have to fix I'll join those two nodes together and if I drag the thing like this I can actually even fix some of the curvature problems okay and that lit doesn't look too terribly bad I can also pick this section up and round it ever so slightly like that so now when I select it and if i zoom back out on it I've now connected the inside of the e and the inside of the D I can do the same thing with the a and the O but I think that you've actually been able to see how I've done that now the O is a little bit different because you don't have a spot that's connected to the outside so what we would do in that instance if i zoom back in on just the oh if I select my rectangle tool again and I don't care about the curvature on it very much if I select it and alter the orientation again I'm gonna do this one just ever so different I'm gonna do it like that now based on what I'm seeing I do need a little bit thicker because my plasma cutter still needs to have it big enough that it will cut it and leave something suspended once I have done that and I changed it in a path object to path hit my shift-click on the outside one and path I'm going to Union those again now it's become part of it as well now I want to show you something before I actually finish that one I'm going to control Z my last action on my Union so I can right mouse copy that object come up here and write Mouse paste and then I can actually literally do the same thing on the top and the bottom but I still need to object to path now it's okay this object here has eight nodes this object has eight nodes so once I can have one selected I'm going to shift select the other one oops got the wrong one Union the things go up to the top one Union and now when i zoom back out - - - - I have all of my letters now fixed except for the a but as I select and pick it up you notice that those black oops that one didn't Union okay so I've got a problem with that when all the rest did so I'm gonna control Z move my motion back I'm gonna go back in into it I'm going to select that one make sure it's got nodes nine notes it's good shift collect that one on the outside and Union now if I pick it up it's now connected so I'm now showing you how to take your letters and connect your letters no matter what the font is and connect them now also I want you to notice that this black line that goes through there that was the edge of the page and I can see then that they're actually connected they're not transparent so I know that I've done it properly there again once I save this save the file as an SVG file it was already called horse I'm gonna save it yet replace it and now it becomes part of my file structure and I can now take it down put it on the plasma cutter change it to a DXF as I indicated on the other one

Channel: andpet55

Views: 8,789

Keywords: plasma, inkscape, hydrotherm, arclight, tutorial

Id: S_8GzUnhfhQ

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019