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Hi, looking for some advice on how to create a word of text in fancy joined up font as a single object for cnc routing. I want to make a sign for my daughter's bedroom door and have seen plenty examples of how to add text to an existing CAD object, but nothing about making the actual text itself the object. Suggestions gratefully received...!
It depends very much on the software you are using to do this. In Vcarve e.g. you can just toolpath the text or you can convert the text to lines and then manipulate it as any other line based objects. What software are you using?
further on what mitch is saying
when you type text each letter is a separate entity , so the router would want to cut each letter out individually
so you need to 'explode' the txt or letter so it is no longer editable with the text command and now you need to manipulate the nodes so that all your words are joined (you may need to do some trimming and adding of splines)
then you need to join the whole lot up again so that the complete word is one entity
but as mentioned, what cad are you using ?
perhaps you can give a font , font size and the word you want ?
Thanks Mitch and Blackrat- it will probably be Sketch Up that would be used for this but I'm open to suggestions. I'm not even sure if that's a decent application to use for designing items for CNC. The word would be "Mirren" in a cursive flowing type script ideally.
what are you using to drive your cnc machine ? mach3 ?linuxcnc ?
I Imagine everyone has different ways of doing it depending on what software you use.
I would use photoshop to draw the sign using a font and some editing to get it all to flow nice, then i would import it into vectric and trace it, you could also trace it using illustrator etc.
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I would write up the text in inkscape, convert that text to path, then save as dxf.
Load the dxf in f-engrave and then mill that with a v-carving bit.
All of that software is open source.
CamBam does it quite well in one program, 40 use free trial:
http://www.cambam.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3211.0
Sketchup works fine , get the .stl export plug in
Many thanks for all the assistance folks. Certainly a few options here. I'll try some out and see how it goes.