Need Some Help with Filling in a Font (looking for a 3rd vector line, not fill option)

LightBurn Software Questions
1

Hi, I am new here and pretty new to laser engraving.

I am trying to speed up the engraving time for text while still getting reasonable boldness.

I first used text converted to bitmap and engraved that as a raster image. It took forever… Next I used the text in its default form and selected fill+line. That was a bit faster. Next I used fill only and that worked sufficiently well and was faster still. Then I accidentally engraved a placard and forgot to change it to fill and it traced the text and that went super fast but the text is not quite clear/dark enough for my purposes.

All this leads me to my question. I will do my best to describe what I am hoping for. Using Letter Gothic as my font of choice, Is it possible to add a centerline to the characters so that the laser will trace the text and then run a third line in center. My hope is to get a little more boldness to the letters while still making use of the speed of the line engraving as opposed to filling the characters.

Is this possible? I have seen a couple of fonts that have multiple lines to the characters (Roman for example) but none of them are plain enough for my purposes. That or (like Roman) they seem to be trying their darndest to shake my engraver to pieces…

Anyhoo, any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Bob

2

I don’t know that a centerline option is available (I could be wrong), but you can achieve something akin to what you want with the offset function.

Make your text, convert to path, select all of it and offset the lines to the inside. The degree of offset will determine where the new lines are placed and may give you the extra you’re looking for.

3

If you have the ability to out-focus Z, you can make thicker outlines in one pass:

4

@retrosmith, @Stroonzo, thank you so much for the replies and excellent tips!

I am trying both to see which gets me where I want to go the fastest. I suspect that with only a tiny 2.5W diode laser though I might be losing too much power unfocusing the laser to maintain the current speed but we shall see.

Thank you again,

Bob