Century Single Line Font

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TReischl
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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by TReischl »

Jousting at windmills is great sport! No one gets hurt and it passes the time.

Century (the original one) is a font that was designed to be used in books. Books do not have LARGE type in the body. Sooo, with a little thinking, you might come to think that maybe the folks designed it for SPEED in processing. You know, lots and lots of nodes take much longer. So if someone is using this font as it was originally intended the cutting will be very fast and those angles will not cause any problems with reading what is written.

In other words, the font is not working for you. It was not designed to do what YOU want with it. That does not mean something is wrong with it.

Sort of like Adrian's analogy. I wonder why I cannot haul sheets of 4X8 plywood in the Porsche? What IS the matter with those people? I see other vehicles with four wheels, an engine, seats that can haul plywood! Could they make my Porsche haul plywood?

Do yourself a favor, set the text size to like .25 or something even smaller and then calculate the tool path with a fairly shallow cut, say .04 with a V bit and take a look at the results. Here is an example:
Capture.JPG
When used as intended, it looks good. Notice you do not see those angles that are annoying you?
"If you see a good fight, get in it." Dr. Vernon Johns

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TReischl
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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by TReischl »

One thing I have learned on this forum is that just because something seems a bit strange to me does not necessarily mean it IS strange, or weird, or whatever.

Reading through posts here over the years I am amazed at how many different things people do with this software. Different machine types, different materials, different end products. The array is staggering.

I recall people discussing stick fonts before and how useful they were, but I do not recall what they were doing since it is not something I typically do.

And then we have Leo, who wants to create huge clouds of dust in his shop machining rocks! :lol: Now that I think about it, that was it, someone was talking about those stick fonts work great in stuff like granite and marble.
"If you see a good fight, get in it." Dr. Vernon Johns

richardg6paj
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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by richardg6paj »

Rcnewcomb wrote:The single line fonts are a library licensed from another company.
Can I ask where you got that information, Randall.

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Mike-S
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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by Mike-S »

These single line fonts are excellent for drag or diamond point engraving. Very useful for me.
If that is what you want to do, why not use the Quick Engrave (with any TTF font) and don't use "Fill" feature?
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richardg6paj
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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by richardg6paj »

TReischl wrote:Jousting at windmills is great sport! No one gets hurt and it passes the time.

Century (the original one) is a font that was designed to be used in books. Books do not have LARGE type in the body. Sooo, with a little thinking, you might come to think that maybe the folks designed it for SPEED in processing. You know, lots and lots of nodes take much longer. So if someone is using this font as it was originally intended the cutting will be very fast and those angles will not cause any problems with reading what is written.

In other words, the font is not working for you. It was not designed to do what YOU want with it. That does not mean something is wrong with it.

Sort of like Adrian's analogy. I wonder why I cannot haul sheets of 4X8 plywood in the Porsche? What IS the matter with those people? I see other vehicles with four wheels, an engine, seats that can haul plywood! Could they make my Porsche haul plywood?

Do yourself a favor, set the text size to like .25 or something even smaller and then calculate the tool path with a fairly shallow cut, say .04 with a V bit and take a look at the results. Here is an example:
Capture.JPG
When used as intended, it looks good. Notice you do not see those angles that are annoying you?
The Century TTFont is perfect and would be used for printing books. Single line Fonts are designed for diamond or single-point engraving and at doing that the Vectric Century single line font fails. If I engrave 2.5 mm height text I can see the flats on the curves. What on earth has putting plywood in a porsche got to do with a bad font. Not sure about Jousting at Windmills either, never seen that so can't comment.

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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by CarveOne »

If you really insist on using this font, and want to spend the time, you can node edit the font characters to change the straight line segments to arcs and adjust each arc to create much smoother looking characters. This could be useful, but they will become just individual characters that are vectors, not a true font set. You would need to do the whole alphabet and numbers this way, then copy and paste the individual characters from a .crv3d file to your project file and scale and align them as you need them for your project. Too much effort for me, but I would do it for a very deserving project.

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Rcnewcomb
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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by Rcnewcomb »

My mistake on the single line fonts. They were developed by Vectric
BrianM wrote:The problem for single line fonts is that the True Type font specification does not support open lines. True Type was designed as a font format for printing and all the outlines have to be closed vectors to meet the specification. The single line fonts supplied with VCarve Pro are a proprietary format we developed to allow use to support single line fonts. As far as I am aware there is no ‘standard’ file format for complex single line fonts which can include beziers, kerning tables etc in their definition.

Brian
- Randall Newcomb
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TReischl
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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by TReischl »

I dunno, seems to me like lots of folks have been using them for about 10 years or so and now suddenly they are no good. Go figure.
"If you see a good fight, get in it." Dr. Vernon Johns

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martin54
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Re: Century Single Line Font

Post by martin54 »

Rightly or wrongly it has been designed that way, maybe who ever was responsible wanted it to be angular rather than a curve, the font doesn't get worse the larger you make it, it only appears to get worse because the straight lines become more noticeable to the eye. The font still has exactly the same number of nodes it had at a smaller size, as I said before vectors don't have resolution. If it was suppose to be the same as the ttf then yes it hasn't been done very well, I don't know why other single line fonts they have produced seem to be OK

I didn't realise that Vectric had developed these single line fonts, I thought that they had come from else where, I have single line fonts in other software that I use for signmaking & assumed the ones Vectric used came from a similar source :lol:

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