Does anyone know any fonts that are specifically for plasma cutting? If anyone has suggestions please be sure they are compatible with both SheetCAM and corelDRAW, and please let me know if they are or are not already built into either sheetcam or coreldraw. If they are not please provide a link where I can download them into both programs. I would be so grateful for any help.
Sheetcam is just for laying out parts on a user defined working surface to generate the gcode for cutting. It’s not a design program.
Look up Arclight Dynamics and Premier Plasma on youtube for good tutorials on Sheetcam.
Any font can be used for plasma cutting, it all depends on how the font is placed and adding small bridging or tangents for any aspects of a letter than would otherwise “fall off” when cut out. Letters can be positive (solid) or negative (cut hollow). The most basic of any font that never has issues is a stencil, used when words are sprayed painted on to surfaces.
I’m asking if there are any fonts that have those bridges or tangents that prevent parts of letter from “falling off” BUILT IN. I know I can just manually create those bridges for each letter that needs it, but if there is a font that already has those bridges built in then that would save me a lot of time.
Right now I’m more interested in negative fonts
https://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=114
Many font websites online, then select stencil varieties. Personally, most are awful looking and very limiting from a design standpoint, but for utility those will fulfill your needs.
Thank you
There are some that just won’t work well though. Papyrus comes to mind Any font with extremely fine detail flourishes or stroke portions can lose those details when the plasma’s kerf is accounted for.
Blocky fonts, stenciled ones for folks who don’t want to manually add bridges are very safe.
Decorative fonts need to be scaled up to be effective and care in just how many swoopy flourishes are part of the letters needs to be watched. One handy trick is to convert the text to paths and then change the stroke width to the kerf size (about 0.055") and you’ll see what the cut-out will look like. Watch out for sharp pokey points - on steel they can become razor sharp.
Oh, Google fonts provide hundreds of free fonts or check out dafont.com is really useful too including some nice search & display capabilities. Using wordmark.it will show you how your text will look in all of the fonts installed on your machine in a really effective browser page layout.
Thanks again
Look into a free program called stencilfy. It is supposed to make about any font a stencil font, I have yet to try if so cannot say for sure
I have oly found one Monoline stencil… but you have to buy it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SolidWorks/comments/k6cspy/one_linemonoline_stencil_fonts_in_solidworks/
This is a great presentation by Craig on making your own font that is stenciled or bridged. So you can do it yourself.
Also, I found that the time it took to make the bridged fonts, I can edit most drawings and change my mind of which font I want to use. After spending all that time bridging a font, I feel torn to use it or use another font that looks better. For the interior to survive, you reliably need about 0.11 inches.
Here is the problem: You bridge for one particular size of font that gives you a perfect sized bridge for a particular size font. Lets say it was designed for 1-1/2 inch tall letters and then decide to increase your font size to 2-1/2 inches: The bridge will grow larger. You will then need to edit all of those stenciled fonts or you have an unnecessarily large bridge that is obvious and distracting.
This might be the best reason to not bridge a font with fontforge but do it manually in your design.
And vice-a-versa, if the font was bridged for a 2-1/2 inch tall letter and you sized it smaller, the bridge might shrink to a point that it is no longer sufficient to support the interior of the letter.
Appears to be a dead program. Can’t find a working link to it. Sounded very promising though.