In this tutorial we'll show you how to unite and exclude your objects in Inkscape.Making sure your objects are combined correctly is important for laser cutting. Using the Boolean Operations in the Path menu, you'll be able to combine shapes and cut holes in your shapes - resulting in clean, closed paths. We recommend exploring these commands in more depth on your own when you've finished this tutorial.This is best explained by example. Let’s pretend you’re me and you want your logo cut out on a nice little stand. You’d start with something like this:Looks pretty good, right? Well, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s view our design in Outline display mode.
I suggest doing this numerous times as you’re designing.Uh oh, see all those overlapping lines? I see that I have multiple objects all piled on top of one another. I also see a couple stray points, an open contour and a line that isn't connected. I'll to need to fix those issues before I send this file to the laser. FIXING OPEN CONTOURSBefore I combine my shapes, I want to fix that open contour, or broken path.
Using the Edit path by nodes tool (F2), I will select the two nodes that I want to join. In the top tool bar I'll click the Join selected nodes button.MERGING SHAPESNow that I have a continuous path I can merge my shapes. Using the Edit path by nodes tool (F2) again, I'll select all the shapes. In the Path menu, I'll select Union.
This will merge all my shapes into one.DIVIDING/EXCLUDING SHAPESThe example above was pretty simple, because I had already made use of the Exclude tool. It seems like a good time to talk about that. The Division and Exclude tools tool let you reverse one shape out of another while making it all one object. For this example we’ll just look at the only the laser gun.To start I basically have one gray shape, with white shapes layered on top, where the holes should be.
If I select all and apply black, you’ll see that I don’t really have holes. I need to cut the white shapes from the gray shapes.Using the Edit path by nodes too (F2), I will select all my shapes. Back up to the Path menu, this time i will select Exclusion.
The exclusion tool will cut the white shapes from the gray, creating one shape that i can send to the laser.I'll view my object in Outline display mode one more time and move my shape. This is to ensure the exclusion tool didn't create any empty objects.As always, before I upload my design, I'll go through the usual pre-flight checklist.
Hershey Text is an extension that can render a line of text in one of several stroke-based “engraving” fonts. This extension solves a persistent problem, and one which we have come across in many different contexts: How to easily create simple and readable vector representations of text.Quick start: Download and install the, which now include Hershey Text. Much more information follows.Huh?
What’s this all about? Why are you doing this?It’s kind of a long story. But it goes to the heart of who we are and what we’re doing.Neither the problem nor the fundamental solution are new. Creating simple representations of text was an important problem in early computer graphics, for both vector displays and pen plotters. Good solutions– sets of “engraving” fonts –were developed. But then along came “outline” fonts, dot matrix monitors, high-resolution printers and personal computers. And that was that.Thirty years later, low-cost and easily available computer-controlled manufacturing tools have created an exciting realm for exploration that’s even open to most hobbyists: Laser engravers, 3D printers, CNC routers, vinyl cutters, embroidery machines, and (yes) pen plotters.
If you design for any of these on a regular basis, you’re likely to come across a case where you’d like to efficiently create some readable text with your tool, and “engraving” fonts are often the best choice. For this very reason, many professional-level CAD tools include some form of engraving font.The trouble is, many CAD packages and most illustration packages (including our favorite, Inkscape) do not come with engraving font support, because it’s such a specialized requirement. We’d like to fix that.Outline fonts versus Engraving fontsWe’ve mentioned outline fonts and engraving fonts, but let’s be clear on these. Most modern font systems (truetype, postscript, opentype, etc.) are examples of.
In these, the font file describes a filled vector shape. That is to say, the visible part of a character in an outline font is the area enclosed by the shape. Fonts like these are appropriate for use in laser printers or other high-resolution devices.By contrast, an engraving font (sometimes called a “stroke” font) is one where each visible character is defined by the stroke itself, not the area enclosed by it.
Fonts like these are appropriate for pen plotters, machine tools, and other circumstances where the pen width itself is significant.Here are examples of text written in an outline font versus written in engraving font:In the upper box, both lines of text are drawn with a solid black fill, and no stroke (outline). The outline font is legible; it looks as it is intended.The engraving font is basically illegible, since the enclosed area is not meaningful.
In the lower box, both lines of text are drawn without any color fill, but instead with a solid black stroke. This renders the engraving text correctly.Now, there’s a time and place for both types of font face.Outline fonts are perfect for use with high-resolution raster imaging devices, like LCD screens and laser printers. In these cases there’s no significant penalty for filling in large regions.But, if you use any of the physical fabrication methods that we’ve already mentioned, then there is usually a significant time cost to filling in large regions.
For example with a pen plotter, it’s much faster to draw the outline of the engraving font than to raster back and forth to fill in the entire outline font area. The higher the pen resolution (the smaller the tip), the slower it will be.
Inkscape Cut Circle
The same goes for text areas cut with a milling cutter on a CNC machine, certain types of laser-engraving, embroidery machines, and so on.A second reason (besides speed) to use engraving fonts with physical fabrication is that the tool size is often significant. The tool size could be the pen width (for a plotter), the cutter width for a milling machine, or the thread width for embroidery. You certainly can use an outline font and just trace its outline, but that can create legibility issues, especially if your tool is wide. By contrast, engraving fonts rely on the tool width to create the legibility. Using mac OS 10.5.8 Even though I have inkscape (and X11) installed and the eggbot extensions are available when opening Inkscape, I cannot find: '/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/extensions' anywhere on my hard drive in order to install the Hershey text1 files. Spotlight and 'find' cannot find any Inkscape extensions folder.
Contour Cut With Inkscape Download
For that matter, where does X11 reside? It has to be installed since it opens when Inkscape opens, but cannot be found in the applications or any other folder?. I’ve been playing with this and have found that gcodetools has some issues processing text involving spaces.
Contour Cut With Inkscape Tutorial
If you enter 'Hershey', render it, and run gcodetools, it will produce fine gcode. If you enter 'Hershey Text' and render it, gcodetools will crash with a huge list of errors. However, there’s a weird workaround: if you enter 'HersheyText' and render it, then click on the drawing, right click and choose ‘enter object’ and then click on and delete that underscore, then gcodetools can process the text correctly without crashing on the space. I have no idea why, but this seems to work pretty well (and makes for better-aligned text than typing/rendering one word at a time and then trying to line them up.) I’m using Ubuntu 11.04 with the latest repository version of inkscape, and the latest as of July 2011 versions of the hersheytext and gcodetools extensions.
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