Printing small letters

[RayW 0]

On 9/12/2022 at 9:37 AM, geert_2 said:

it will always look like from the Flintstones

 

 

I think that's what I'm seeing, the Flintstone Effect. But now that I'm developing a better understanding of the relationship between line width and stroke width, I'm hoping to find some compromise that's better than my current results. I'm printing some text now in several sizes and fonts (including Geert.ttf) to see what works better than the rest. I'm printing at 25mm/s so it's going to take a while.

[Cuq 198]

35 minutes ago, RayW said:

@Cuq

I like that font. From everything that's been discussed here, it looks like it has the right attributes. I assume it's not yet available as a .ttf file. When you print 2mm tall text, what's the width of the stroke and the line with? How are you printing narrow lines like that with a .4mm nozzle? Are there other slicer adjustments required (speed, retractions, feed rate)?

The ttf file is available under the indicate link, as well as the project file if you want to modify the font

[RayW 0]

My bad. I saw the project file and missed the font itself. Got it now, thanks. Is it missing a space character (ASCII 32)?

[Cuq 198]

I Don't know, but it should not be an issue

[Cuq 198]

11 hours ago, RayW said:

When you print 2mm tall text, what's the width of the stroke and the line with? How are you printing narrow lines like that with a .4mm nozzle? Are there other slicer adjustments required (speed, retractions, feed rate)?

 

As mentionned in the wiki page I've designed this Font to be print with the 5.0 release of Cura . 2 mm is the minimum for a 0.4 nozzle and in this case the width is equal to 0.4 or closed to 0.4, and you will have just one wall.  But I don't recommend this size, with this nozzle size.  It can be used just to indicate something but you will not get a clean text.

 

4mm (0.8 width) is a prefered choice in this case.

 

Edited September 14, 2022 by Cuq

[geert_2 557]

Forgot to say earlier: the height of the text (= how much it is raised or recessed from the surface) is also important for legibility and quality: too thin and it will not be legible, too thick and it will get more deformed. You might also want to play with that. Usually, I make it raised 0.2 to 0.3mm, or recessed 0.5mm. Hollow watermarks look best around 1mm thick, sitting 0.5mm below the surface. When buried too deep, watermarks will be blurred and unreadable.

 

Watermarks can be (1) hollow text, or (2) solid text surrounded by a hollow rectangle: both give a very different appearance, with the solid text in a hollow rectangle usually looking better. Both versions are shown in my testplates.

 

Small recessed text is most problematic: the nozzle can not get into thin openings of characters like N, M, W,..., so these voids tend to get closed.

 

See my test-plates with different heights of raised and recessed text, and different watermarks (via URL above). You can simply print these STL-testplates, and see how it comes out. Each STL-file is accompanied by a JPG showing what it should look like.

 

Further, the reason for printing slow is that this gives less ringing and less overshoots, less thickening of corners due to braking, and less variations in nozzle-pressure, and thus less variations in extrusion-rate, and thus smoother letters with less defects. The reason for printing cool is that this gives less stringing, and a more accurate shape, as long as you have no underextrusion. Thin layers also give a more accurate shape, where in thicker layers the text looks rather like bent sausages.

 

The bright yellow plate has solid watermark text surrounded by a hollow rectangle, caps height 3.5mm.

 

[UltimakerDAV 0]

Also trying out printing text.  The top one was done with a 0.4mm nozzle, the bottom at 0.25mm.  The best standard font I have found is Roboto Bold, though for what I am doing I only need Upper Case letters, so haven't tried Lower Case.

It doesn't seem to be a standard part of Windows but I found it in OpenSuse Linux.  I printed both very slowly, as you can see I had some problems with blobbiness here and there.  I printed with a 0.5mm depth and very slowly and with a 0.1mm layer height, I am going to try 0.3mm and maybe 0.2mm depth and see if it helps reduce/eliminate the blobbiness.

[RayW 0]

On 1/8/2017 at 2:01 PM, gr5 said:

Here are some examples of small lettering I've done. This is with .4mm nozzle. I can go much much smaller with .25mm nozzle but never had to.

These were on UM2 with .4mm nozzle. Swapped filament after first print was done (first print was red, second print white on top).

 

 

I can't believe how good this looks.  I've seen some descriptions of how to do this, and most z-hop over the red print when printing the first layer of white.  You appear to be printing the first layer of white without regard to the red that's already been laid down.  Doesn't that severely squish the white filament as it's printed over the top of the red?  I assume the red cannot be more than 1 layer high or the nozzle would trip over the red print when printing the white.  It's sure a lot easier than worrying about aligning the text with a cavity in the cube.

[GregValiant 1,245]

If you allow the first layer of the letters to be the base color, and then switch colors for the second layer, then the nozzle is above the base for travels between the letters.  It makes post-process cleanup of any strings much easier as the lettering color won't stick near as well to the base color.

[gr5 2,167]

It has been a while since I did these letters.  I think I did either 0.1, 0.15, or 0.2mm layer height (and only a single layer) for the red "part" and then as a completely separate part I did the white part which indeed was identical and flat and ignored what letter(s) were being printed in red before hand.  The white part was almost certainly 0.3mm thick on the bottom layer.

 

One advantage of having it as 2 separate prints is you can use a razor to cut away any strings/traces or even decide to clean the bed and start over. Also it's important to use a dark(ish) color.  Red worked great.  Black will work great but yellow probably wouldn't work well.  Also the part itself needs to be white - otherwise some of the color will show through.