Secrets to Inkscape for CNC - Text to Path Tricks and Shortcuts (PART 1)

hello everybody thank you for joining me this is adam at maker table um i made a video a while ago about how to use inkscape for plasma cutting and it was really long and pretty complicated and i covered a lot of ground um so i decided that it'd probably be better if i broke this up into a few different videos so i basically i'm going to make this sign here but in so doing i'm going to go over basically three main skills this video is going to revolve around working with text here in inkscape which is a free program that can generate vectors that your plasma table or plotter or vinyl cutter or even laser waterjet you know any sort of uh plotting x y control table can deal with and uh what a vector is is basically a straight line really nice clean straight lines with x y coordinates little nodes is what they're called little dots here and we'll get into that at the very end but i just wanted to show you um two main principles of positive space text right up here and negative space text right up here first thing you're going to want to learn is control z that undoes whatever you just did if you mess up don't trip you've got control z and then if you want to redo what you just undid you can hit ctrl shift z and you can pretty much move back and forth in time on your computer using those two keys in a lot of places actually so first of all let's go over some positive space text this is the easiest people love this you're going to select follow my comically oversized mouse over here this is your text tool oh sorry don't double click on it and we're going to write the top line of this sign here as you scroll or as you drag and scale stuff you want to hold ctrl for some reason my uh keystroke tracker is not showing you that i'm holding control right now but i am holding ctrl here's what happens if you drag without holding control you get these really weird stretched you know features this can be handy for some stuff but most of the time you picked a font because you like how it looks so let's keep our regular sizing here and then i'm going to go and select my font that i want i downloaded this american captain i think it looks pretty cool i'm going to go ahead and make it a little bit bigger so it's going to fit on this sign you know maybe it's a little bit too big that's probably about right but i'm going to show you how we recreate this sign um the next thing you're going to deal with if you're cutting with vinyl you're pretty much ready to go you can probably take this to like your vinyl cut master software or whatever you're using and that's probably enough but for plasma we've got a few more steps here we need to connect these together in some way i'm going to show you a few different ways to do that so the easiest way is you make a line i've got my opacity on here so let's fix that 100 i want this nice solid black and you just bump it up against the bottom and make it touch the bottom there we go [Music] that's right there nice and tight and then same thing over here all right so um this is about the most complicated it's ever going to get here folks is if you have um some text you just wrote and a box you just drew and you want to basically combine these together because if you send this to your plasma it's going to cut this box and it's going to cut these letters and they won't be connected so you're going to have to go through a few steps here first of all you're going to have to convert all this to a path which is you can go up here path object to path is what we're doing but it's a shift ctrl c so we're going to shift ctrl c and now all this stuff is a path meaning it's nodes and then we're going to uh control shift ctrl k we're going to break this apart so each one of these things becomes separate shift control k here let's make sure shift ctrl k we broke it apart see how now um these are two separate things and then last thing we got to do is shift ctrl g which is ungroup and now we have all these separate letters and this separate box down here you can select each one by itself and uh so once again this is going to cut all the stuff out separately it's not going to give you what you want with plasma you have one last step and that is union so we need to let's see control shift plus plus and now all this is one object ready to cut you can check by clicking your node tool over here and this will show you each one of these dots is an xy coordinate that your plasma table is actually going to go to while it's cutting so now we have our positive space sign and this is actually ready to save control shift s as a dxf uh actually let me show you what happened here i went too fast so if you select this you want to hit control shift r that's going to make this uh come into your cam software this corner will be your origin if you didn't do this step it'll come in floating around somewhere else you can still grab it but this just makes it a little bit easier before you save so ctrl shift s is save and you're going to save as dxf let's name this these colors and if that's all you want to do guys you can take off you successfully made a positive space sign obviously if well not so obviously let me show you if you want to do this in cursive really quick let's find a cursive font anyone will do oh well not that one it's not cooperating no that one's too complicated birds of paradise okay this one works um if you want to do cursive it's pretty easy this stuff is almost all joined together here but this uh you see the co is not connected the e isn't touching um so what you're going to want to do here is your um what is it again ctrl shift c um ctrl shift k ctrl shift g now you've ungrouped and now you've got each one of these things separately you can select them and then you can bring them over and we can make them touch and once they're touching now these two words will cut out together you see up here that the top of the h and the t aren't touching so you can actually go over here to nodes and once you select this t and this node tool over here you can grab these and actually bump them up so it starts looking weird but you make them touch then you can go and smooth some of these nodes out if you want i'm not going to get into all that it takes forever but sometimes it's worth it and now we're going to make these touch and now we've got these two oh here we go we got this right here is not touching now we got these touching all right so now this is one big piece of metal and this is one big piece of metal and uh we can go over here and uh ctrl shift plus plus now it's all joined together and we have one nice happy node family that can cut out as two big pieces if we hit control z control z let me show you we still have separate nodes this is all going to cut out as one letter this is going to cut out as a separate letter this is going to cut out as a separate letter you see where i'm going here you don't want separate letters you want this to be one big piece so that's why i have to go through all these steps anyways not doing cursive but if you want to do cursive you can do cursive now folks all right now let's do some negative space this is kind of easy land for uh plasma i think there's just a few little tricks here but let's go through it so you guys can all be on the same page um here is my font holding ctrl y scale can't see it because it's black on black so i'm going down here i'm gonna select white go back to my text tool i'm going to pick my font which is this american captain and then i'm going to scale this up so this is another tool i'm going to show you if you notice um these aren't quite the same width this is narrower and in this sign i have these almost the same width so they look you know kind of visually the same weight is what i'd call it so there's a tool if you go back to your text select this and up here this is a known as kerning and this is how you set the space between your letters it's any number between 0 and 100 and it'll create more space evenly throughout all of your text paths it's super handy i think 65 is actually where i want to be for this because i just did it over here guys that's how i know already but usually you can just punch in a bunch of different numbers till you find out what you want then you're going to need to add lead ends the middle of this d the middle of this o the middle of this r are going to fall away and disappear into your water table downdraft table or maybe just onto your floor depending on what kind of setup you've got and you really want those to to hang tight so that they can make it in the final piece um so you can read the sign so i'm going to draw a box here um make it black and then i'm going to get my picker tool change this to inches because i'm in america if you're somewhere else you can use whatever you want but .2 inches is a pretty safe bet in all conditions all thicknesses of metal for a lead in using fine cut consumables cutting really thick material you know there's like other thicknesses that will work but i'm just telling you guys that's one that does in most situations um sorry i just drew that and i hit ctrl c to copy ctrl v to paste really um you know pretty basic window stuff here ctrl v i'm going to paste another one and you can set these wherever you want um sometimes you can get away with it just connected on the bottom i'm just showing you guys all the way through keep it safe make sure nothing falls out so we've got all of our lead ends in we've got our text kerned and uh you know i'm pretty happy with this let's uh center it up we have a line so we'll center it this way center it this way now we're centered up if you want this to be your sign there's the last step is you select everything hit alt b now and this is going to take an image so we go from nice scalable perfectly straight line which is all fonts or scalable vectors um and then it took a snapshot of it and made it this pixelated line uh what you know it's kind of not ideal to have pixels but you'll see why we do that in a second here we lost all the different boxes this file up here is this box these let's see here these letters and all of these separate boxes it's going to try and cut out all these different things at once and it's not going to turn out very well this however can now be traced shift alt b remove background you can click the preview if you want to see it and this is going to change it back into a nice dxf vector file that we can send right to the plasma and as you drag this off you'll notice you can see through what was white is now empty space and then the last thing to check is this node tool boom we've got nodes these are xy coordinates at the plasma table or plotter or whatever you're using can follow as directions to control your cutting head so this again is now ready uh ctrl shift r to resize the canvas around it and ctrl shift s we can save this as a dxf and that is ready to cut and put into a cam software here alright guys so hopefully that was helpful these are like the greatest most common text tools in inkscape that you will use if you are um trying to send this on to another cutting file or you know machine basically so good luck um video 2 will cover um basically a little bit more composition and how to remove the background colors and add an image basically to text that's really the next part of this sign making deal so please if you guys thought this was cool and useful hit sub hit subscribe you know where the button is it's right

Channel: Maker Table

Views: 10,631

Keywords: inkscape tutorials for beginners, inkscape tutorial, text to path, inkscape tricks, inkscape shortcuts, inkscape for plasma, inkscape dxf, inkscape vector, inkscape text, inkscape design, inkscape for dummies, inkscape tutorials, inkscape text to path, inkscape for cnc, inkscape tutorial cnc, inkscape secrets, inkscape vector path, how to inkscape, how connect text inkscape, metal sign design, metal sign design plasma, plasma sign design, designing for cnc plasma

Id: v5X3ohStaPA

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020