I just wanted to say thankyou. Despite the huge gaping hole of not being able to adjust text character width on text to path, everything else is just so well thought out. Flood fill should be removed as it has no use as far as I can see.
I have worked around the issue of text to path by preparing artwork in illustrator and importing. I can continue preparing artwork whilst the laser is busy. EZCAD was painful for having to have the laser on to work.
I love the software now I have the initial issue solved. I am 4 days into a new 100w MOPA and Lightburn after 5 years of 30w and EZCAD. So worth every penny.
Do you mean that the capability it offers shouldn’t be used for quality reasons or that it doesn’t seem to do anything that regular fill does not? The potential benefit of this may not be as apparent to you running a galvo as compared to let’s say a diode laser that’s running much more slowly. But the idea is that a lot of time and motion can be saved by the laser path only going over the engraved areas rather than through all the whitespace.
With reference to text to path. If you apply text to, let’s say a circle. The text will be standard character width with no way of changing it. In ezcad you put text into a circle and have control over the character spacing and character width, this means you can fit text to a specific size circle, rather than have to increase circle size or reducing for size. We normal lines for text you have perfect control, just not once it is applied to a path.
Flood fill just seem to produce poor quality, this may only apply to galvos, I can’t say, but with a galvo there is nothing useful about it unless you are happy to reduce quality for minimal time gains.
There’s certainly a potential quality issue with other lasers as well since this stresses the tolerances of the machine but the time savings is potentially significant. We’re talking easily 10x in common situations. I suspect you’d have some people up in arms if this was pulled.
Are you familiar with the HSpace component of the Text tool? It’s not apparent to me from your description if this is what you’re after. This will essentially allow control of the spacing assigned to each character.
Now put in more text than the circle can take in standard form and watch it fall apart, the extra text is hidden, being able to change the character width would solve that. As it standards you are hugely limited on control over text to path.
I am pleased that some people find flood fill worthwhile, but in some instances speed over quality is OK
In that case are you looking to actually squish the characters visibly? Or where the characters impede on each other?
It sounds like ideally you’d be able to control the linear length that the text is allowed or required to consume.
Have you seen the “Feature Suggestions” button at the top of the forum. You can create or upvote a feature request. May be worth looking to see if there’s something like this.
