Font for etching.

Phil O

Western Thunderer
Hi all,

As a newby to drawing up artwork for etching, sorry if this has been covered before. I was wondering how I go about adding text and numbers to said artwork, as it would be useful to be able to identify parts of broadly similar appearance.

Many thanks .
 

Marc Dobson

Western Thunderer
It depends on who is doing your etching. PEC accept written text but G&H require you to draw out each letter and then hatch it.

Marc
 

neaston

Western Thunderer
Any font will do but on Turbocad it needs to be "exploded" to work properly.
That changes it from text to a graphic object
Nick
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
Phil,

I had a problem when applying lettering to an etch I did some time ago. I was using AutoCAD LT and it was not good at producing a decent font. So I used CorelDraw to produce the text and imported it into CAD using DXF, and all looked well. The etch was twelve small etches of the same part all with the same amount of text repeated on them - Part name, part number, description and copyright symbol. I sent it off to PPD and got an email back the next day saying that they were having problems dealing with my .DWG file for the etch in that it was very large. I had a look at my source files and eventually tracked the problem down to the imported text from CorelDraw which had thousands of minute vectors. I couldn't find a way of reducing the vectors from CorelDraw, but found a way to produce the text in Acad LT which had a much smaller count of vectors.. So if you do find a way of producing your text, watch out for the vector count in the characters.

Jim.
 

BrushType4

Western Thunderer
You should be fine using the text in Qcad but it’s easy and less likely to cause any font issues to explode (don't forget to explode twice) and fill the resulting shapes if needed.
 
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Jeff Ennis

New Member
That's what I do (with Qcad) - use the font - explode it - I use G&H and they're fine with it.

Phil - explode twice?

Jeff
Scorpio Models
 

Mike W

Western Thunderer
Jim's post reminded me of a recent problem. I also use AutoCAD (not LT) and recently opened .dxf files made by friends in CoralDraw and TurboCAD. Neither came in properly and I've ended up having to draw the carriage again.

Mike
 

Jim smith-wright

Western Thunderer
Sounds a right faff. I use illustrator for my artwork. Just use any font I fancy and convert to outlines and what gets etched is exactly what I see. Takes a fraction of a second!
 

Tony Overton

Western Thunderer
I've been re-training myself lately on NanoCad 5 (not used it in ages) and can't get it to explode text. I'm doing something wrong but not sure what.
 

BrushType4

Western Thunderer
Sounds a right faff. I use illustrator for my artwork. Just use any font I fancy and convert to outlines and what gets etched is exactly what I see. Takes a fraction of a second!
to be fair its just two clicks, not really a faff at all. Its a feature as long blocks of text can be broken into small sections and still be editable.
 
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