Engraving center of text

[Anonymous]

I've managed to get the engrave function to work ok, but it seems to want to trace around the characters. Is there a way engrave in the center of the character either with the engraving tool or with a small ball endmill? The tracing around the outside is not as easy to read for something like a part number etched into a part. It's also slow.

Thanks in advance.

[Steinwerks]

Can you share an exported .f3d of the model, or a dummy model exhibiting the same problems?

[Anonymous]

Here's a copy of the model as well as a picture of how it cut. I'm just not sure if tracing around the letter like that is my only option at this time, or what. Maybe it's the best I can hope for until we can engrave with a ball endmill to trace out the center line of the letters. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong!

[HughesTooling · Accepted solution]

What you're after is single line engraving, at the moment there is no built in function to draw single line fonts. You can import something as DXF of SVG and use trace, that's about the only work around.

Mark

[Anonymous]

Sounds good. I just wanted to make sure I want missing something. Thanks!

[HughesTooling]

I was just experimenting with some stick fonts available here. The numbers worked quit well, a few missing lines from the letters. Wouldn't take much work to put right.

Mark

[MattWynn]

yes. Single line fonts are really important.  We need to mark plain text on parts and we need it to be fast, really fast.

Enentually we need to be able to support machines that can machine the text automatically given the letters.

[Anonymous]

That's what I need. Simple part number, fast with a small ball end mill. The engraving cutter is too slow for production.

[Steinwerks]

You can also use a 2D Contour and turn off Compensation Type which will use arcs and smoothing. Did this for some line engraving last week.

[antmob]

Has there been any updates on the ability to create single line text and engrave on center? Seems like an easy fix considering all the advanced features they have been adding to the software. Also, I've noticed that when engravinging text, the toolpath that is created is not very efficient. It will sometimes start engraving letters towards the end of the word instead of starting at the first letter and continuing sequentially. This issue will cost a lot of time when trying to engrave large quantities of parts.

thanks in advance for any input!