The most legible font - text

Community Laser Talk
1

Please
which fonts from Windows11 / LightBurn do you think are the most legible for engraving on plywood at a size of 3-4 mm? (with standard setting)
Lowercase / Uppercase letters

I assume it’s always a good idea to slightly outline them?

the most #legible text ?

2

Of course I asked AI, but it often doesn’t know

But this is what it answered:

Arial – simple and clean lines, excellent legibility.
Verdana – wide characters, good for small sizes.
Century Gothic – modern, sans-serif, sufficiently wide spacing.
Tahoma – very legible due to solid and strong strokes.
DIN Pro – industrial look, great legibility at small text sizes.

:thinking:

3

Try them all as a sample burn on your product. What works for you very well may not work for me.

I tend to work in Tahoma. Outline or not will depend on your project. Over burn will make any text hard to read … less is often more. Set your overscan to about 5% to prevent burn where the laser stops and changes direction.

4

At that size on wood, I’d be tempted to use a single-line / stick font from the SHX family:

A useful collection:

5

I think good readability
is a pretty universal theme :thinking:

(but it’s clear that the font will affect how it’s engraved as well)

6

Thank you, I will try it
I generally need 3-6 mm
but really easy to read

I forgot to include the specification in my question
for some texts I need a font of this specification

  • Encoding: UTF-8 or Latin-Ext (Central European character support)
  • Subset: latin-ext (extended Latin for Czech characters)

SINGLE LINE FONTS :thinking:

7

I know some of the SHX fonts do not include any characters beyond the simple ASCII subset, but I have not explored all of that collection.

Certainly, there are far more SHX fonts than I can imagine.

Good hunting! :grin:

1 Like
8

Many good and nice fonts often have one major problem.
They are not for Czech

example
Á Č Ď É Ě Í Ň Ó Ř Š Ť Ú Ů Ý Ž
á č ď é ě í ň ó ř š ť ú ů ý ž

9

Make an object for your custom marks as needed, place where you need it and go burn. There is more than one skin on most cats.

I do that a lot of the tilde, …~ …over the n in some Spanish words. It’s easier to go back and add that little mark than it is to hunt down a specialty font or ASCII code.

10

Each font has a slightly different (Length - Čárka - Comma) and (Caron - Háček - Hook)
and native will know it’s not right
and that includes precise placement