Mar 20 2009
Nobody tells you… (fonts)
Three years ago I’d never given any real thought to the actual process of engraving. Sure, I’d had things engraved before but even then I hadn’t really thought about what goes into the “back room” handling.
Perhaps this is because I’d never really been exposed to anything except hand operated engravers (either the Dremel style of tool or it’s more commercial bretheren) or an occassional manual pantograph style engraver where choices of engraving styles were fairly limited anyway.
One huge realisation was dealing with fonts.
Coming from a long computer background i was used to dealing with fonts on a daily basis. I thought I understood how they worked and how to put them to best use depending on my requirements. On moving to a computer engraver (at least, a rotary version, I’m fairly sure a laser engraver would function more like I’m used to in terms of font handling) I had to un-learn a range of things.
For starters, a rotary engraver works on lines. If you want an area, you have to fill it with lines. One line at a time. Almost every computer font is actually an area rather than a line. That means that engraving a standard computer font can leave you with an outline of your chosen font or, if you’ve told the engraver software to fill, a series of nested lines. In some circumstances this produces a very effective engrave. The rest of the time, it makes for a very slow engraving job (i.e. it takes a long time to finish on the engraver) and the result is not all that pleasing.
A good engrave really relies on dedicated engraving fonts. My Roland engravers came with a couple of these engraving fonts only. That left me only little better off than my old manual engraver in some cases. I raised it with the company that sold the engraver and they helped me find a few more. This really helped. I also learned that some computer (TTF) fonts actually engrave quite well – albeit taking much longer.
Looking around Google it seems that finding actual line fonts for use with Dr Engrave (Roland’s engraver software) aren’t readily available. That’s a shame as the few I have are far more effective, particularly on large jobs where you’re engraving 30 or 40 trophy plates in one go.
Standard computer fonts that I’ve found seem to work fairly well include Edwardian Script, a nice script font that engraves well as a line font (don’t use a fill) as long as you’re using mixed case (all capitals becomes unreadable); Monotype Corsiva, a less agressive script font that can be used without a fill at smaller font sizes (really needs fill at larger sizes); and, Playbill, useful on engraves where you need a font that is tall for it’s width, I always use it filled.
This only really touches the surface on fonts but it’s a start…
