Are there any single line Fonts?

Yes, that’s exactly correct! In the Text Object window with “allow single strokes “ checked. I apologize if I’m not getting the terminology just right! If there’s anything I can help you with re: my single line fonts, let me know any time.

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Couple of years ago I had to draw my own simple single-stroke letters and numbers (but not a full alphabet) as I needed them for laser engraving. At the time I wanted to create a true Windows-compatible font by myself, but the free programs for font creation that I tried were not intuitive to use.

If somebody is willing to create a freeware font using that particular style, feel free to take inspiration from the following image. I used the grid snap to make the letters and numbers easy to edit. All are 10 mm tall and the majority of them are 8 millimeters wide, though some are slimmer (6-7 mm wide) to optimize the used space. Of course, the “I” letter (which is missing) would be zero mm thin since it’s just a vertical line. Corner radius is usually 2 or 3 mm, rarely 2,5 mm (for example, the top half of number 8).

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I played a bit with the font and created a full English alphabet (capital letters only). Here is the Rhino 5 3dm file in case that somebody wants to use the font. I also included a few examples showing how to arrange the special characters:

Азбука (Rhino 5).3dm (151.0 KB)

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Do the curves need to be arcs for the engraver, or could they be smoothed into the straights to make them prettier?

I’m afraid that I can’t understand your question. Maybe my English is still too poor. :slight_smile: Do you mean that arcs should be replaced with G2 blend curves instead?

Yes, provided your tooling can reproduce them (I know little about CNC).

About 10 years ago I used to CNC-mill various stuff from wood and styrofoam, and I used other custom made font whose letters consisted only straight lines (very simple, but not pretty). I used it for both, wood carving and laser engraving. Then I created a smoother version with arcs. The Mach 3 software that I used to run my CNC-machine had a setting to accept arcs as simple objects to speed up the CNC-milling without stop between the separate segments.
The new font that I posted above was primarily made for marking of laser cut metal plates by using a low power setting for the cutting laser. Example:

is that a part of an aeroplane?

It’s part of a steel frame that holds a few parts such like solenoid and latch used in a front trunk of a car.



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Hi @Rhino_Bulgaria,

Here’s a wip of an installable font: just for the letter forms at present - character spacing hasn’t been worked on yet. Limited Latin character set. No way will I produce a full 64K Unicode set but if there are a few more specific characters needed then let me know their Unicode values.

I have tried to stick with your design intent as far as I could but have made a few changes and my interpretation for the lower case and other unshown characters may be way off. Comments welcome.

Usual caveat: these are only intended for use in Rhino Text Objects, not Text.

BulgarLineA-Laser.zip (13.8 KB)

Regards
Jeremy

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Wow, that font works flawlessly in Rhino! :slight_smile: Many thanks for the effort to turn it into a native Windows font!
That would save me a lot of time should I had it several months ago while I worked in a company where my task was to name almost 500 laser cut plates. At the time I had to arrange all letters by hand. :smiley:

PS: A few lines in certain letters create bad objects, even though I see no reason for that.

If you let me know which ones, I’ll take a look - send me a PM if you prefer. Also, what would be the minimum gap between lines that you could resolve with the laser?

I think that you can use “! _SelBadObjects” to find the lines that create bad objects. I will write all letters and will make a screen-shot with the ones that this particular command recognizes as bad. :slight_smile:

As for the spacing, I was using 2 millimeters between characters, even though some of them needed to be 1 mm closer in certain combinations, such like:
“-7”, where the number 7 was too far away from the “-”)
“LT” (1 or 2 mm closer due to the large space in-between)

PS: This is the alphabet, both in capital and small version. The selected (yellow) curves are bad objects according to Rhino. I also noticed couple of missing lines in the small letters.

Great, thanks for the info - I’ll check them out.

I managed to get the “MecSoft_Font-1.ttf” font to show up in the font list, but not the “BulgarLineA-Laser.ttf”.

Hi @osuire,

It’s a work in progress - except I haven’t had much time to progress it of late. I need a better understanding of how Rhino interprets it to iron out the wrinkles.

Anyway, were you trying to install it on Winows or Mac?

AH ! It works, but it required to close and re-open Rhino.
Windows here.
It works in V6 and V7, but all the numerals don’t pan out…

I’ll try and find some time to take another look at it sometime soon. Unfortunately my font editor is on my desktop pc and I’m away from the office at present.

Thanks Jeremy, I found a viable workflow here, with the Mecsoft font.

I find it amazing the McNeel lets us struggle with this while they claim to provide the perfect tool for CNC hobbyists…

@jeremy5 I noticed there are a lot of duplicate lines in your font, I think this makes it fail