I am new to CAD and have no drafting experience what so ever. I work for a welding shop that recently purchased a CNC machine and we use Rhinoceros Commercial. Everything we will be drafting is 2-D I am wanting to cut words out of a sheet of metal but when I cut the lower case e and a it just leaves the outline. I am wanting to cut them in stencil form so that centers are not cut out. How can I do that?
You’ll need to find a Windows TrueType font that is made to look like a stencil so the character islands don’t fall out.
Rhino uses the TrueType fonts that are installed in Windows on the computer that Rhino is running on.
If you Google “Stencil TrueType font” you find lots of them. I don’t have any specific ones that I uses so I can’t make a recommendation.
Keep in mind that these fonts were not designed to be used for modeling. What this means is with some characters in most font files, there may be problems in the curves they create. If you find one that won’t Cap when you extrude it, or won’t Boolean from another solid, it’s probably because the curve made from the font character has stacked control points, little loops, or zigzags in it’s boundary curve.
The CurveBoolean tool is very helpful for “cleaning up” these buggered up imported curves.
Good luck
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