Has anyone an idea of how to get a text engraved like an old manual engraver. All fonts in the library seems to be an area with an outline and not a single vector.
I want to use the machine to do some simple stuff like engraving on laminated plastic signs for an electric install as I am looking to ditch my old pantograph engraver. Should be a simple task but the complex fonts making it harder than it should be, and far slower if you need filled fonts. a “Simplex” font would be great.
Pretty sure Luban deals in TTF (and/or OTF) fonts, and that’s just How They Work. I mean, standard computer fonts are intended for paper printing and screen display, which aren’t vector environments.
I gather that what you want is, effectively, a single-line font (so that if you’re engraving, say, an N, the laser or CNC bit draws a line up (Y+), diagonally down (X+ Y-), and up again, then moves on to the next character). I can see how that could be done, but you’d need to work up a special gcode generator with a built-in font, and I’m not aware of any pre-existing software with this ability.
In theory, you could work up a vector file with really skinny text using Inkscape or similar, but that may be more trouble than it’s worth (and Luban would probably mangle it anyway).
I do it all the time. I draw all my text in illustrator as a single stroke and save as SVG. Then run it thru the CNC. It’s work, but you’ll eventually make it streamline process.
Start with what are called “single stroke fonts”, “single line fonts”, or sometimes “engraving fonts” (although that last term sometimes means something else).
Practically, just use Hershey Text in Inkscape. Hershey Text v 3.0 | Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Plenty of useful information at that link.
IMHO that Single Line Font thing should be a feature within Luban.
There is also such thing as bezier curves generator. I’m sure there are tools available online for this.
In college one of my exams was to write a piece of software to convert any font to a set of bezier curves (it’s simple math) so it could be used in applications such as this.