Engrave Improvements?

[LibertyMachine]

@al.whatmough @jeff.pek

Is there any possibility that we are going to see much needed improvements in the area of Engrave? 

"But, But.. We already have Engrave and look at all that v-carve we can do!"

Yeah, you know what I'm getting at and you KNOW that's not the answer. I need to simply machine engrave an incrementing serial number on a bunch of parts and it needs to look stellar under 20x magnification (customer request). Simply following a centerline at a constant Z depth is the way to go. None of this V-carve BS. That is what the machinists are looking for; quick and simple text engrave following a centerline and no varying Z heights.

I've watched the video in this reply, and I'm sorry, but I don't think the answer is to continue doing things the way that's shown. Can you imagine having to manually offset the centerline for dozens of texts with a S/N stretching out 16 digits?

And on top of that; the sizing and positioning of text could use some improvement. A .120" defined height does not necessarily yield that in actuality, depending on what font you are using.

Comments, thoughts, ideas?

[porsbym]

Seth, thanks for your feedback. I think we can certainly address your concerns, although maybe not all of them in the first version.

The circular text requirement is a good one that you brought up, though as that might affect how we implement the first version - even if we won't necessarily support circular from version 1 of this.

Thanks again!

/Mark

[porsbym]

Oh, and for what it's worth, Mark often uses a random mix of I/we/us/me. Speaking about yourself in 3rd person is also always fun 🙂

/Mark

[daniel_lyall]

@LibertyMachine You can speak for me on this.

@porsbym Hit up the API Guys and see if they can do a plugin for doing serial numbers and that sort of stuff, Or add a lua hock so plugins that are already done can be added 

[mart.hough]

Hi All,

I arrived here looking for answers to engrave shortcomings too. I make production parts and have to flip over to conversational on my mill to run the engrave job.

For me a good feature would be to perhaps use a sketch to define a box, like a placeholder to input text. or the text element has a fixed x,y co ordinate.. centered on a defined element.. centre, left, center center.. and alignment options too. So the text must fit in the box, and will auto size, or the text can grow about a point.

That might not make any sense.. Real world example.. my part serial number is offset from the stock edge by 3mm and centered along that edge, so I'd like to enter a value, then define the location by clicking the midpoint of that stock edge, or a construction line that I pre offset by 3mm.

Click save. Now all I need to do is edit the text, not the location and it'll auto centre..

Also. No engrave tool type in the tool library???

Also.  I agree - a nice modern single line font with arcs.. like Helvetica

[LibertyMachine]

@porsbym it's been 7 months since this topic was discussed, I'm just wondering if it ever went any further than there? Looking at a batch of engraving to do early in 2018 and I'd "like" to say I used Fusion for 100% of the creation of this part...