For want of a font - losing business to competition.

[merissa rittmaster]

"But.... I have them...

However, they were a 'gift', and I'm not sure if it's okay to pass them around. .. I need to make a phone call and find out, which may be next week..."


I realize this thread is a few years old... did you ever contact the people who made the diamond drag fonts into laserable fonts? if so, I was wondering if you could let me know how that worked out... Thanks... Merissa

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

I downloaded a few engravers' fnts 10 years ago, to try on our cnc router, but found them unusable, because they didn't seem to have an 'up' command- in other words an uppercase E had a zigzag front edge joining each horizontal line.

I started 'making' my own using an older version of Corel Draw I had which offered a 'centreline trace' option, before Corel took that out.
It was a bit convoluted, but I'd size the letters in whatever font I wanted, export them as a jpg, reimport them, and vectorise them via the centreline trace option.
It DID work! I had a single line font then I could rout with a 60 degree Vee or engraving cutter or even a skinny ballnose cutter. It wasn't really a font but a series of lines that resembled the former letters.
Later I bought a diamond-drag spring-loaded endmill that you use in the router, with the spindle switched OFF- to be able to scratch-engrave little plaques when the odd nuisance arrived.

Half the trophies these days seem to have lasered plaques, and half the old engraved ones are covered in different fonts, depending on whether it was hand-engraved or which computer system was used in which decade... so it's not difficult to make a decision and live with it!

Of course the E-cut plug-ins for Corel will do a centreline trace from vectors now.