I got a request to teach a person how to do the offset cut line I created for this project, so I thought I’d put together a quickie tutorial (the request was for Illustrator, I believe there are already tutorials in Glowforge Tips and Tricks for Inkscape).
This was the image I created:
And the steps I followed were these:
Create your text for engraving in Illustrator. Convert to outlines (Type,Create Outlines), then make a duplicate of this and give it a stroke, no fill:
In the Stroke window, give it a really wide stroke (20pt in this case). Play around with it until you like the distance of the outer edge. In this case I didn’t like the blocky edge so I also selected Round Corners in the Stroke dialog (middle selection).
Now go to the Object…Path menu and choose Outline Stroke.
Looking good but there are a lot of overlaps. With all this selected go to Pathfinder and choose Unite.
That’s pretty good but we need to eliminate those internal parts (unless you wanted them cut out as well). So from the Object…Compound Path menu choose Release.
Okay, now we do another Pathfinder…Unite to incorporate all those internal bits.
Now all you have to do is change the Fill to a Stroke.
Now drag it over your original text and center it. Maybe change the color so you can specify it as a separate operation if you decide to cut the text at some point.
also, it can be a fairly complex shape when you’re done. you may want to take a little time to clean up nodes if there’s good separation from the text.
A little noodling with simplify path took me from 107 nodes to 39.
I removed a few more paths along the bottom and above the Y to simplify more and am down to 24 and it looks much cleaner.
