Short guide to the use of laser cutting machines/Laboratory/Cut of cursive letters for display

Cut of cursive letters for display. In this laboratory we will learn to add cursive fonts to the operative system and to cut them in order to use them as message or display. The letters will be the untouched material, the borders of the letters will be cut, this will allow them to be cut or taken out of the material. For this purpose we will use a laser cutting machine that can be ULS, glowforge, etc. And a vector graphics editor such as Inkscape, Illustrator or any other tool. It is recommended to review the guides to use them: Use of Inkscape for Laser Cutting Use of Adobe Illustrator for Laser Cutting Downloading and installation of the font More than 1000 open source letters are available for download and install, in this case we will use a cursive letter because it allow a clean cut that can use the whole text since the fonts are united. The font used in this laboratory is Pacifico, it was created by Vernom Adams. Once it is downloaded, unzip the file and double click the font to install it. After this it will be available to use on Illustrator and Inkscape. Type the text and edit it. Type any text that you would like to have laser cut in the material that you selected. Use the right font size for the desired output, 20 for middle size objects, 60 for words that will use a 10+ inches width. Add a under line using the pen line, then increase the stroke size to 2 or 3 points, and then move the line to allow it touch the letters. Select the line, click the object menu, expand, select stroke (if not selected) and press OK (on illustrator). This will be useful when uniting the text and the underline. Create Outlines converts text and its underline into vector paths. Press v key and click and select the text, maintain pressed the shift key and select also the underline draw. Click the type menu, create outlines. Union of the text and the underline Select both, the text and the underline, windows, pathfinder, click the unite icon. This will fuse all the letters and the underline. Prepare the text and underline for the cut Select both, the text and the underline, in the option fill mark it as empty, in the stroke option select color red (FF0000) and 0.072 pts for cutting in ULS, or select cut if using Glowforge. Select the object menu, compound, make. This will prevent the text from burning. To allow the fonts to be cut in the same way, or be double cut in some sections, in a uniform way, select object menu, path, simply and adjust the values to 100 %. This will prevent the laser cutter machine to double cut in some sections of the fonts. Cut the object Now that your design is ready, print it, to be able to see it in the ULS, or select the design with Glowforge and cut the design. A rectangle could be added to frame the text (the rectangle could be rounded), it could be united to the underline and the text. Also a base could be added to hold the rectangle or the text having a 0.25 inches area to insert the text, this could allow it to stand for display. ULS may have problem cutting materials when not even... when this happen, flip the material, print the file to see its shape on the ULS software, mirror the image, then use the zoom and pointer to mark the points and align, cut. See also Short guide to the use of laser cutting machines/Use of Inkscape for Laser Cutting Short guide to the use of laser cutting machines/Use of Adobe Illustrator for Laser Cutting