I’ve been trying to find an answer to this question for 6 months. Nobody seems to be able to help.
I’m part owner of a sign company and one of the things I do is operate a Roldand EGX-30 engraver to make plastic engraved signs (you see 'em a lot on ships and in doctor’s offices). The engraver uses a rotary bit to engrave the outline of the letter into plastic engraving substrate which is one color on the top layer and a different color on the second layer allowing a different color letter to be engraved.
My question is: Is there a font that has super-thin lines in the letters that doesn’t require me to fill in the inside of the letters?
In the past I’ve used Arial and then used CorelDraw to contour the letters inward so that you have a solid letter rather than the outline of a letter. But this takes forever to engrave.
Currently, I’m using a modified version of Arial that I thinned down to where the outline is almost touching. This works well except that some of the letters are shaped kinda funny. It’s working for now until I find the right font, but somewhere there’s gotta be a font just for this sort of thing.
Roland isn’t much help so I figured maybe someone here has experience with this type of thing.
We actually use a Gerber CNC router rather than an engraver (much bigger signs) with Adobe Illustrator, but I can give you the gist of it and you can adjust for CorelDraw. What you need is a single line for the path; the multiple lines you have now are why it takes so long. In Illustrator, this can be accomplished by either doing a negative offset path until you reach the center line of the font and delete the overall letter, or you can take half of what you have modified on Ariel away so that you don’t have two lines almost touching but a single line. Basically, the program traces lines, so it isn’t a matter of font thickness so much as a matter of having lines for letters, if that makes any sense.
It sounds like you’re talking about the Illustrator equivalent of the ‘contour’ function in Corel.
Years ago, I ran a very old Dahlgren engraver. The computer part of it was kindof like an old K-Pro with a smaller screen. The fonts it used which were loaded from a cartridge, were single stroke. There was no trace of a regular TrueType font.
The only problem with the single stroke is that there’s no way to vary the width of the stroke, in the event that there is a reason to. For example, if i’m using something other than block letters and the font is more like Times New Roman where the letter ‘o’ has a thin line at the top of the circle and a fat line at the sides.
It just seems like there must be a font designed for this.
Would you mind giving more detailed instructions for Illustrator and I’ll try it out?
Just basically type a word and then what menus I have to click to reduce the fonts to centerline.