[Windell] developed an Inkscape extension called Hershey Text that helps you process fonts into vector representations. If you’ve tried to 3D print, plot, or mill text in the past you may have run across the problem of generating vector paths that deal with the outline and fill of the text appropriately. The problem stems from how fonts are defined; either by the area that they enclose, or by the path that is used to draw the outline. Check out [Windell’s] tutorial for this extension where he explains each of these issues and shows how to overcome them.
The image above illustrates the stroke options, which allow you to vector multiple paths to best fill in the correct parts of each character using path-based hardware. The package includes a wide variety of interesting font sets that are in the public domain, and includes tools such as a glyph map generator that make it very user friendly.
This is cool, I have been running into some of these problems engraving with my CNC, I have been looking for a better option. Will this output to g code?
“… that helps you process fonts into vector representations…”
From what I can see it is just a collection of allready premade fonts.
So, this just helps output better instructions for engraving font faces when using a CNC machine?
Frankly, I’d just convert the text object to path in Inkscape. Quick and easy, and no plugins required.
thanks a bunch for this! I’ve been using various engraved TTF fonts but unsatisfied with them and annoyed with the excess detail in the object..
Would have left this comment @ evil mad blog, but they’ve closed comments on this post…
It appears that as of Inkscape 0.91, single-stroke fonts are now supported: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/716676 I haven’t done a test cut yet, but manipulating the stroke and fill on a single-stroke font seemed to act as expected.
Hi, I saw the eggbot extension for inkscape and for hershey text , single line font there are only a few fonts, how can I add more ? and how they are called “true type fonts” ? Every truetype font can be added to hershey text extension ? If so , how ? I really need more fonts to be added
Can you help ?