Text printing GCODE

[samsfisher 0]

Hi There,

I am wondering if there is a technique out there that can print text as cursive letters using just the nozzle width. In short, the tool path should be cursive and the nozzle deposits the material at .4mm. Effectively i will get a stroked path of text. I believe @DAID has an approach for it.

The current problem with slicers is that whenever i use text it tries to infill making the quality bad. I am looking for constant width stroke that represent text.

Any ideas or suggestion.?

Uma

 

[anon4321 16]

If I understand your question, you want to print cursive letters using only a single pass of the nozzle so the "stroke" is .4mm. Is that correct?

Unless Daid has a utility to do this, one way to do it is to use any of the free engraving software (google text to gcode).. However, it isn't a complete solution. They generate gcode for 3 axis engravers or milling machines. 3D printers are actually 4 axes, the normal X, Y and Z of an engrave/mill plus E for the extruder material feed.

Note this only works for one layer. So let's say you used one of the text to gcode utilities for an engraver/mill, you would set the Z to be the thickness of the layer say .1mm. The gcode would would have all the moves for the X, Y and Z. However, the E value would be missing.

So you would a second process that reads the GCODE and calculates the amount of material to feed for the move and add it to the moves as the E value. You could probably do it in excel.

What type of printer? UM1 or UM2 or other?

 

[samsfisher 0]

@anon4321 thats exactly the problem i am trying to solve.

I am playing around with such text to gcode software. The problem i find there is the fonts are made using infill (regular ttf fonts) which impedes the cursive text output. Whereas what I get is a two oulines for any character which leads to overlap and other material depositing issue. I agree this is a start but I have seen Daid doing it in one of his test prints.

I have a UM2 and another makeXY printer.

 

[Daid 306]

I did? That's special, as I don't recall doing this.

But, you should look for CNC milling fonts, or lasercut fonts. That should help you. I know they exists, fonts with just a single line.

 

[anon4321 16]

If I understand, this is what you DO NOT want correct?

Because 1, it's not cursive and 2, it is "thick" even though it is an outline (even if it isn't filled) correct?

You want the equivalent of taking a pen and writing in cursive but using a single pass of the print head in place of the pen, correct?

 

[anon4321 16]

If I was correct in my last post, you should look into:

http://ncplot.com/stickfont/stickfont.htm%20and%20the%20very%20last%20font%20on%20the%20page.

 

[samsfisher 0]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/t31.0-8/p843x403/10661703_1553496754871778_2806605136491490929_o.jpg

This is exactly what i want. But I am not sure how this is done

 

[pm_dude 27]

The previous path doesnt work for me (darn that url parser):

http://ncplot.com/stickfont/stickfont.htm

If you can get a gcode out with something that suit your need I can look at adding the E value to it and duplicating/reversing the layer to get the needed height.