Font in Corel, no outlines

[david minnery]

Hi All,
I'm pretty new to laser engraving.
All my text work transfers to an outline of the font, which is fine most of the time.
However, for my business name I'd like it just a single line so I can do a shallow cut to scribe my name instead of engraving.
Attached is an example of the font outline, which is what I don't want.
I hope I'm being clear, is this a corel setting?

thanks,
David

[Mike Null]

I'm guessing that your drawing page is set to outline fonts as a default setting.

For a tutorial on how to set up your page defaults go to Engraving Concepts.com and look through their tutorials.

For a quick temporary fix highlight the text and left click on a palette color. That will fill the outline then right click the white X box and that will remove the outline.

[david minnery]

Hi Mike,
I'll check out that link.
The pic is what I wanted, I don't want to fill it.
I'd like to have the option of no fill or outline. perhaps it's my font choice.

[david minnery]

I think the solution is a single line font.

[Roy Sanders]

The way that is accomplished is click on windows and then on dockers and then on object properties at the top. the properties docker will appear on your right.

Then you can select your pen settings and the fill or no fill option. you will also have font options and other options that you can mess around with to see what you like

did that help

Roy

[Richard Rumancik]

I don't think a single-line (single-stroke) font is compatible with the requirements of a TrueType font. I investigated this some years ago and it seems like True-Type fonts require the font characters to be closed shapes. So the best you could do with True-Type is probably a very narrow stoke font but it would actually be plotting twice on each stoke. Other than that you have to create a vector font. If it is just a name or logo, it is doable but if you want a general-purpose single stroke font it is not something that can be easily done using normal font techniques. Of course a vector font is not editable like a True-Type font.

Perhaps you could take a font such as Arial and trace it using a centerline method but I would not hold my breath as to the quality of the result. You might have to edit the trace to clean it up. For more complex fonts (eg with serifs, lots of curves) I doubt it would work very well at all.

[Richard Rumancik]

I just tried this idea on Arial test by converting the string to a bitmap at 500 dpi and then centerline tracing. Even with a simple font such as Arial the result was not very good. The "A" and "S" were really bad. The "T" has a dip at the intersection point.

I tried again at 5000 dpi and the result was better (the trace took a little longer) but surprisingly the "A" does not trace very well at all. Maybe there are some settings that would actually make this possible but I don't know enough about trace options to suggest how it could be done better.

[Kev Williams]

Attached is an example of the font outline, which is what I don't want.

The pic is what I wanted, I don't want to fill it.

So, I'm confused, I'm not sure if Dennis wants outlined or filled?

[John Noell]

Over at mrrace.com in a cambam thread there is a post about just this topic, with fonts that appear to be real truetype but also true single lines. I have not tried them.

[Kev Williams]

I have some single-line TT fonts, some I got from this board. But they're not "true" single line fonts, they ARE outlined fonts, but at 1" tall the lines are offset around .002", so at least to the naked eye, they appear single line. But if you vector cut them, they cut like any old fat letter.

This is what this font looks like in Corel a 1 inch tall...