Single Line Fonts, how to get them

I am trying to get single line fonts for engraving. It seems every program wants to outline the True Type Fonts (TTF). In my search, I have found Stick Font from http://www.ncplot.com and it comes with a rather, well, stick looking font. It is a free program and I'm happy with what it can do "out of the box." The program will output the text into a dxf which I can load right into Mach3.

The program says you can load any .chr font, which is some sort of Borland programming font.

These chr fonts are hard if not impossible to find. I've searched the web and came up with one file for the font. I tried loading it into Stick Font with no luck.

I also found a program called Easy Fonts. The program claims it will convert any True Type Font into the chr format. However, when I use the program in demo mode, the output text file is a mess and looks nothing like the Stick Font default.chr file.

So, does anyone have these .chr files in the proper format?

Or, does anyone know how to make a different program output non-outlines?

I tried deskengrave and a couple other programs with no luck. Just outlines!!!

Thanks in advance,

Aric Shelby

Sue Scott [email protected] has her husband's Letterease Autocad plugin.

Expensive but good.

http://www.softscout.com/software/En...etterease.html

Letterease has about 8 single line fonts that can be exploded into polyline paths having tangent arcs instead of short straight segments.

That's part of my problem, I'm not trying to spend a lot of money. If I do, I would like to get the most bang for my buck.

There is a TTF to .CHR program, Easy Fonts. $90. I couldn't get the demo to output a usuable .chr file that I could import into Stick Font.

If anyone has had success with Easy Fonts converting, then I will pay for it. At least then I can have any TTF font at my fingertips.

Thanks for the link, I'll check out scoutsoft.

Aric Shelby

Here are some possibilities:
Stick 40
Technic
Trebuchet MS

www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts
www.ncplots.com

Regards,
Jack C.

Thank you for the links, but they are for True Type Fonts, that is the problem. I would like to find the CHR font sets that allow single line fonts.

It's hard to believe that everyone uses outlined fonts for every application, that would be crazy. Name tag engravings and all kinds of signage could use single line fonts.

There must be a way,

Aric Shelby

Hi Aric,

The font file that StickFont reads is actually a custom format, so I don't think you will find a program out there that will save in it's format. I've started working on a graphical editing tool that will make it easy to create your own fonts within StickFont, but it's not ready yet. If you have a font that you would like to use within StickFont, let me know and I'll work on creating a font file for it.

Thanks,
Scott

Scott,

Thanks for all the help, that is great stuff. I was thinking it could be a custom format, the few .chr font files I found looked nothing like stick font.

Is your tool going to let people convert TTF fonts, or only create new ones graphically?

I was thinking I may have to actually sit down with Autocad and start x,y'ing out a custom font. Arggg.

Are you going to make the GUI open source? I would love to play around with what you have if you are going to make it free.

I have .net studio, and I was thinking of something along the same lines, I just don't have the time to sit down and work with it and make routers.

Let me know if I can help at all, I am VERY interested.

Aric Shelby

Aric,

My plan was to just create a graphical tool for creating fonts. The format of the font file is actually very simple, but as you probably know it's a painstaking process to create a font from what's essentially the "graph paper" approach. So, I'm hoping the graphical editor will inspire users to create fonts and share them with others. It would be great to be able to offer a library of font files for StickFont.

I hadn't even thought of reading TTF fonts with StickFont because there are so many programs out there already that will convert these fonts to G-Code, including my own NCPlot.

If you wanted to create a translator that could convert vector files like DXF or HPGL into the StickFont font files, that would be excellent.

Thanks,
Scott

It would certainly inspire me to sit down and convert at least one font into the stick font format. I would like to try Comic Sans first.

I would really like to write the translator, but I start flight school (Navy) next week and really don't have the time.

Please keep me advised when you get the GUI finished. And I'll do the plotting for at least one font.

Thanks again,

Aric,

This sounds good to me. Just keep an eye on the NCPlot website for an updated StickFont.

Scott

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by jcc3inc

Here are some possibilities:
Stick 40
Technic
Trebuchet MS

www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts
www.ncplots.com

Regards,
Jack C.

---

Any updates on the new graphical software you all were talking about?

Also, the link should be www.ncplot.com without the "s" as in the above quote.

Thanks in advance,

Vogavt

Hello,

The latest version of Dolphin PartMaster - Vs10 has a two new of stick fonts available. They are based on Arial - a fairly standard looking font and Lucida - more of a script type font.

Both fonts are created using bezier curves not hundreds of line segments and machine in a very smooth manner.

Each font can be scaled, mirrored and rotated, the Arial type font can also be italicised. You can can also create you own fonts by modifing the standard font, for instance creating a font that has larger than normal inter-character spacing.

PartMaster Level 1 allows you to create the text and the machining path in a single operation, then simply post-process to create the Gcode file.

As well as text, Level 1 has Profiling, Pocketing, Complex Area clearance and Drilling cycles.

We'll be creating more of these fonts in the future.

Contacts
[email protected] for North America
[email protected] for the Rest of the World.

www.dolphincadcamusa.com
www.dolphin.gb.com

Best regards
Andre

Corel X4 has a small number of single line true type fonts. When outputting them you need to take away the fill and give a .001mm outline so that your machine or cam software can see the plot path.
The fonts are in the extras section of the DVD

Oh , I forgot . There is no block normal equivalent but the script fonts are nice. If anyone finds a block normal equivalent please let me know.

Serbian Cyrillic Single line font, created in StickFont Editor .

Thanks stonix for the upload.
I loaded the chr file into StickFont v2.5 and noticed that if I use a space character the next 18 or so characters get underlined.
Sorry I don't know more about cyrillic characters, but maybe it's supposed to do that or maybe not.

Just letting you know and giving you an opportunity to provide some ideas as to what might be going on.

Appreciate you!

Update: I loaded it into StickFont Editor v1.5 and found that it's character 0x20 and it has a character width of 32.0 and the single horizontal line is there. I went back to StickFont v2.5 and exported from a test.nc from there and sure enough the underscore line is there in the GCode.

I'll let you fix it if that's what it needs.

(For me, I just deleted the line in StickFont Editor and set the width to 12. Appears okay to me now, it's your file so....)

You have to instal additional input languages, and then switch between them.

Mach3 comes with a (free) writing wizard. It works quite well.

Cheers
Roger