Text engraving

[Anonymous]

I haven't found any reasonable way to engrave text in CAM, even on a flat surface. There don't seem to be any true monoline fonts that we can explode and do a trace toolpath on, and treating text as tiny pockets has proven too buggy to be usable. It would be great to have a simple way to trace text with a toolpath, whether that be a good monoline font or a "engrave text on surface" option in CAM. I would also LOVE to have a good way to engrave on a non-flat surface, like around a cylinder.

[Steinwerks]

I concur wholeheartedly!

Engraving is an essential machining/manufacturing process. I have made at previous jobs, and continue to make at my current job lots of parts with a part number engraved on a surface. One could utilize other software to paste in code to a posted program, but that's tedious and should be completely unnecessary, as well as the requirement for hand debugging the code to make sure it will work with current offsets and the like.

Add to this thought a simple text formatter, such as forming text around a curve on a 2D plane or along an existing feature and it'd be golden.

[Anonymous]

Huge modelling timesaver, Vee carving toolpath from vectors is a winning feature in some CAM programs.

[schneik-adsk]

Single stroke fonts are what is needed to get a good engraving path. How many fonts and styles do would you need?

[curtis.chan]

Hey guys,

Great to hear the discussion around engraving.  I just created a quick tip video in regards to working with the Trace operation for embossing (second half of video).  Hope it helps with some of our functionality.  The CAM team is aware of requests about engraving, and expect to see more functionality in the future.

[LibertyMachine]

Saw that this thread had a "Comments Requested" tag, so I figured I'd toss in my 2 cents.

Single stroke fonts for good engraving, yes, that would be nice. Also, if it was a font that had actual curves to it, that would be even better. A "2" should be made up of one arc and 2 lines, not 15 different line segments to make an actual radius (only comparing it to the CAM that we use at work)

Wrapping text around a cylinder is neat, but is that outside the scope of what F360 is meant for? Almost going into 4 axis work at that point

[kb9ydn]

Wrapping text around a cylinder is absolutely in scope for Fusion, since the plan is eventually to add 4/5 axis machining.  I would even say, why stop at wrapping to a cylinder?  Why not allow wrapping to any curved surface?  (Note that wrapping is not the same as projecting)

C|

[Anonymous]

Curt, thanks for that video. (Off topic: that Patch trick is just beautiful.) The embossing system you show works great for large text and symbols, but for smaller text we really need a single stroke font to keep the letters looking clean. If we had that, then this method would be great for engraving on any flat or nearly-flat surface (projecting to a more severely curved surface would result in some unsightly distortion of the text).

As far as fonts go, all I would really need is a nice, clean, simple single stroke Gothic font. I would imagine two or three fancier ones would also be useful to some folks.

You don't need a 4th axis to make text wrapping around a cylinder useful. For instance, if you're only putting text around, say, 90 degrees of the cylinder, then you can reach all of it in one setup. For now, though, I can certainly live with just projecting text as long as I get that single stroke font.

Keep up the good work guys.

[Anonymous]

I agree. It was at this point that I got stalled when trying to learn SW. That is how I found Fusion 360. The newest version of SW does have a stick font, but it has some issues as well. It needs to be traced in the same manner as the video above shows. You cannot simply inset the text into the solid and expect it to be machined. I have been using Turocad for about 11 years. It has several nice stick figure fonts that I use all the time. Nothing special. Straight lettering.

Similar would be nice in F360 for sure.

Is there a way for us to add our own fonts? I doubt that especially since it's cloud based. 😞

[Anonymous]

I did finally find a stick font that worked pretty well in Turbocad. I saved it as an SVG and then imported it as per the video above. It came in huge and backward. The TC file was in inches as well as my A360. I scaled it down to .007 percent. Then I tried a dozen times before I got the position correct. 

The scaling tools for SVG iports could be better. Once out of the import screen, I could no longer scale or place the text, but I see in the video that he was able to.

I'll give that some more tries. 🙂

[Sandflo]

Any news about engraving and stick fonts?

I had a job that i had to use my other camsystem just to do the engraving, thats a very wierd workflow in my opinion.

Its a simple function and should work in fusion also.

[Anonymous]

Why are there still no single-stroke fonts? This is a ridiculously easy feature request. It should have been incorporated by now (not to mention that it was a silly oversight to not include any engravable fonts in a CAD/CAM package from the beginning...). What's the hold-up?

[Sandflo]

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@Anonymous wrote:
I haven't found any reasonable way to engrave text in CAM, even on a flat surface. There don't seem to be any true monoline fonts that we can explode and do a trace toolpath on, and treating text as tiny pockets has proven too buggy to be usable. It would be great to have a simple way to trace text with a toolpath, whether that be a good monoline font or a "engrave text on surface" option in CAM. I would also LOVE to have a good way to engrave on a non-flat surface, like around a cylinder.

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+1

[jandekkers]

Would love to see the engraving "Drag and Rotation" implemented. I have to switch to another package for the engraving which adds more design work as well as machine setup work. Any ETA ?

[LibertyMachine]

Still no answer on simple engraving? Really was hoping not to have to take a small project to work to engrave a short piece of text on a fixture.

[Anonymous]

I'm making up some jigs right now and need a single line font engraving tool in Fusion360 to mark the part no's and other simple information. I don't care if its a serif/ san serif font. I just need to make some quick and simple text engraving on a falt surface. I have a work around but its a really crappy one.

I make up the text I need in Illustrator and convert to paths. Then I measure the thickness of the objects and do offset path -(~half font object thickness) I delete all the original objects leaving my approximation of a single line font. Then save as SVG and import to fusion. Then I create a CAM trace workpath on the imported SVG. It's a real pain!

[kellings]

Would it be possible to generate the centerline of a truetype font? I used to create signs where I wanted a single stroke font for the engraving process, but I wanted an outline font to show the customer what their sign would look like when finished. I spent hours doing things to make this work both ways. 

If a sketch could be generated that represented the centerline of the font, that would work nicely. I don't know how well this would work with most fonts though as they aren't always symmetrical. 

[Lonnie.Cady]

Just going to bring it up again.  Not being able to easliy engrave PO#, Batch#, Serial#, Part#, Revisoin#, Port/Orifice Size, etc... is pretty much a show stopper for me.  I have used 2d contour and trace in HSMWorks to cut these.  It is not a CAM issue but a CAD issue in Fuison.  We need stick fonts that are sketch geometry so we can select them to engrave.

The video Curt has shown is great, but when things like PO# change every run I don't want to import an SVG again.

[jheinzmann]

This has tripped me up, too. With what I am doing, being able to vee carve text is pretty important, and I still use a second software package for this particular functionality. Its awkward to say the least. Given the existing functionalities of Fusion, you would think that vee carving from sketch/svg boundaries should be almost straightforard.

Curt, do you have an update on this feature being implemented? From my perspective, this is much more relevant than cloud rendering and stuff like that. As a customer, I can tell you we need to get stuff working! I would really like to ditch my old software, and I would think this is in your interest, too 🙂 

[GPTech2444]

Any idea if when engraving will be available?

Thanks.