Printing small letters

[gr5 1,664]

Many sans serif fonts work great such as the most popular two fonts on mac and pc - helvetica and ariel respectively. Both excellent fonts. And the font I am looking at right now as I type (Arieal).

I'm not going to out the guy but someone said to me personally that @rich17222 should be "given a yellow card" for choosing such a horrible font to 3d print. It was in jest of course.

The purpose of serif's is to make very very small type easier to read. It's used on newsprint and magazines where the writing is quite small. For larger print - taller than say about 4mm there is no need. Serif's may be pretty in their own way but they hurt readability more than help at that point.

[geert_2 498]

I can do fonts of 2.8mm tall no problem. Just fine tune of the settings and tons of retractions to keep every extrusion under-control.

 

Hello neotko: the text on the blue and green plates have different sizes. Could you tell which height they have in mm (capitals height, not raised height)? And with which nozzle these were printed?

When printing small text of a few mm capitals height, I always have clearly visible "circles" on each character, where the nozzle stops a moment, retracts and then lifts off. Sort of little donut-deformations.

But I don't see these donuts on your characters. So, I was wondering how you did that?

Concerning the image rotation: could that be in the image settings recorded by your camera (the so called EXIF or IPTC info in each JPG file)? Some image viewers auto-rotate a picture based on these settings, some don't. So if your viewer does auto-rotation, and you upload it, but the website doesn't (or vice-versa), you may have this effect. Just guessing, but it's an educated guess.

[neotko 1,417]

0.4 nozzle. I use tons of retractions for the fonts, and wipe+retracting (simplify3d, and I think new cura has something alike?) and while the keychain is printed mostly at 60mm/s the fonts go at 40mm/s

Size in mm depends from model to model, but the small ones 2.80-3.2mm tall more or less

[geert_2 498]

0.4 nozzle. I use tons of retractions for the fonts, and wipe+retracting (simplify3d, and I think new cura has something alike?) and while the keychain is printed mostly at 60mm/s the fonts go at 40mm/s

Size in mm depends from model to model, but the small ones 2.80-3.2mm tall more or less

Thanks!

[burtoogle 498]

Hello Folks, I am new to Cura (and this forum) but I just thought I would mention a new Cura feature that can improve the surface quality when you have raised letters. The Cura master branch now has a setting called "Minimum Infill Area" which specifies a lower limit of the size of an area of infill (in mm^2). Areas of infill smaller than this will be replaced with skin.

The rational behind this feature is to reduce the likelyhood of the skin being segmented when small features (like letters, lines, etc.) are raised above the skin surface. So if the skin can be printed in one segment that extends under the raised features rather than a bunch of segments that surround the infill below the raised features then the visual quality of the surface is improved. YMMV.

[Lord Hatfield 0]

I find that the Ultimaker prints fine with small lettering,

BUT-

you need to set the height to 0.78 inches or above and the width around 0.39 inches or above any smaller and it could get puzzled and ruin the print..

 

Regards. Lord Hatfield.

                                    Northern England (U.K)

[Quan 0]

Hi everyone,

i got my printer yesterday and tried to print a stamp and its own mold.

its 2,2cm x 5,5cm.

and these are my outputs. Any idea why? 

Mine is 0.4mm nozzle

and infill density is 20%, not 60% as screenshot

 

please find cura setting attached and 2 of my products 😞

 

[burtoogle 498]

Hello @Quan, it's hard to see what's happening from your images, could you please save the project and attach the .3mf file to this thread. Thanks.

[geert_2 498]

At first glance it looks like underextrusion, thus not a text problem but a general problem, as there are holes in the base plate too. But it is hard to say without more info (printer model, material, temp, speed, flow rate, etc...)

 

You could try to print the same plate, but without any text at all, thus just a thin flat plate. At exactly the same settings, and see what comes out?

 

[Acedra 0]

@geert_2, what is the width and height of the letters as well as the z height? I'm trying to print some super small stuff and your's look incredible. Just trying to get an idea of what I can expect from mine.

[geert_2 498]

5 hours ago, Acedra said:

@geert_2, what is the width and height of the letters as well as the z height? I'm trying to print some super small stuff and your's look incredible. Just trying to get an idea of what I can expect from mine.

 

Note that the pastel blue and green models shown above are not mine, but from neotko. But they look great indeed.

 

My dimensions are in this pic below.

The character sets (RSDOC-format) and testplates (STL) can be found here:

https://www.uantwerpen.be/nl/personeel/geert-keteleer/manuals/

 

 

 

[inventabuild 4]

On 1/9/2017 at 12:43 PM, neotko said:

@krys

I can do fonts of 2.8mm tall no problem. Just fine tune of the settings and tons of retractions to keep every extrusion under-control.

I wonder why the image shows rotated..

 

Hello neotko, I get gaps in my little letters using 25% Outline Overlap.  What % do you use to get rid of the gaps?

[neotko 1,417]

7 hours ago, inventabuild said:

 

Hello neotko, I get gaps in my little letters using 25% Outline Overlap.  What % do you use to get rid of the gaps?

 

 

And S3D, and basically, each font size is separated on a process and each process uses a different nozzle size, even if you use 0.4 nozzle you (depending on the precision of the extruder and issues from a bowden) you could do 0.32-0.36 without getting stringing (if your extruder can do it without breaking the filament). That's why I use directdrive and bondtech feeder. To do tiny fonts you need the extrusion as precise as possible, ofc you can also ramp down the temperature and print them slow to get almost the same effect, but will need tunning. The outline overlap is a weird setting, for example for 4.2mm fonts I use single extrusion infill and force 1 perimeter to avoid getting both mixed, or for 2.8 I force gap infill and play with the settings until I get a crisp gcode preview. This ofc assuming the filament is close to perfect, a filament error of +0.06 will make your tests a mess, so is all about finding the balance, the smaller the text the harder is to get repetition

[inventabuild 4]

Edited

Edited October 13, 2019 by inventabuild

[inventabuild 4]

On 1/13/2017 at 11:20 AM, geert_2 said:

In the beginning, I also had trouble that Cura wouldn't print things smaller than 0.4mm (UM2 with standard 0.4mm nozzle). So for printing small text, I designed my own character set on a 0.5mm grid. Thus all strokes are wider than 0.4mm, with some spare: vertical and horizontal strokes are exactly 0.5mm wide. Diagonal strokes have a width between 0.48 and 0.53mm.

Caps-height is 3.5mm, and most characters are 2.0mm wide (except W, M, and a few others). These characters are very easy to design, and they print reasonably well if printed cool and slow enough.

I also tried different variants of some characters, to see which are printed best for raised text, recessed text, and hollowed-out text (=completely inside transparant material, as a watermark).

See the picture for an idea of the characters.

Edit: added pictures of these characters 3D-printed as hollowed-out text, thus text fully enclosed by this transparant PET material. Here too: caps-height is 3.5mm, character width is 2.0mm.

Nice work! What software did you use to design the font?  Can you post the font somewhere for download?

[geert_2 498]

I didn't make a real font-file, since I don't know how to do that.

 

So to set text, you need to copy and pasted each character from the character set, letter by letter. Like in the old days of metal printing. This is good for a short copyright notice, but not very suitable for 3D-printed newspapers, obviously.

 

The character set is in DesignSpark Mechanical's native format, RSDOC; and DesignSpark Mechanical is freeware (requires registration).

 

If you would like to convert these characters to a real font, thus a TTF-file or similar, feel free to do so. Just keep it free for everyone.

 

Also, I can read STEP-files, but can not export to them. So, if anyone has the STEP-converter option in DesignSpark Mechanical, feel free to export this set. Then it is still not a real font, but at least the STEP-format is way more universal than the RSDOC-format.

 

The set is still here (scroll down a bit): https://www.uantwerpen.be/nl/personeel/geert-keteleer/manuals/

 

[Pompopom 0]

@gr5 in this topic:

I'm astunned by the pictures of the 2 colored "scrabble" blocks you posted earlier. Nice Job.

 

Seeing that result I'm planning on doing same thing for having a logo + arrow left/right and a Menu in the frontface of an enclosure.

Can/will you elaborate on the process applied?  It seems as if you "just" print the letters and then apply a closed layer of white on top of it?

Or is that an optical illusion and does your stl from the white "stone" have the letters in negative?

 

Either way: how many layers thick do you print your red letters?

 

Thx very much for the info and the inspiring images!