SVG Fonts

SVG fonts/Hershey text can be used to make single line lettering that is cut into materials rather than engraved. The benefits are two fold because they cut significantly faster and the colour doesn’t fade over time.

I used them significantly in my new puzzle box Loki’s box of tricks
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/msraynsford/lokis-box-of-tricks

I’ve wrapped up several of these fonts over on my github
(I’ve tried to attach the Norse one here but the forum is trying to render it as an image, which it isn’t).

There’s Greek, Norse and two kinds of Semaphore which are good for simple codes, I’ll be adding more in the future.

I’m assuming you can import these fonts into the glowforge software the same as any other font.

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Perhaps it’s a problem on my end, but even though the SVG files contain what appears to be “glyph” data for letters, all the files open as empty in Inkscape (and any other app, including safari, chrome, firefox…)

Font manager won’t recognize SVG.

(And GF UI says:
image

You can’t import any fonts into the Glowforge software. It renders text on cloud servers, and the fonts available are from the Google Fonts library.

There’s no design in the file, just a font definition, so it should appear blank.

Inkscape has an SVG Font Editor panel that you can use to view/edit the glyphs, but AFAIK you have to import this font definition into a program like FontForge to turn it into a font file you can use with the text tool.

Maybe there’s a way to use it directly with the HersheyText extension in Inkscape, but I have never loaded a custom font into that.

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This is exactly how I use it,
I guess the way forward for glowforge users would be to prepare the text in inkscape and import it into the glowforge software that way instead.

https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2011/hershey-text-an-inkscape-extension-for-engraving-fonts/

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I consider myself fairly handy in Inkscape but can’t for the life of me figure out how to get these files in as fonts.

Nice thought, though.

You put the file in “Program Files\Inkscape\share\inkscape\extensions\svg_fonts”
Write your text in a standard font and select it.
Go to Extensions->Text->Hershey Text.
There’s a range of standard fonts already included with inkscape but go to the bottom of the list and select ‘other’
Then type the font name into the text box.

Agreed it does seem a bit convoluted now I’m trying to explain it but it’s totally useful and worth it.

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/⁨Applications/⁨Inkscape⁩/⁨Contents⁩/Resources⁩/⁨share/⁨inkscape⁩/⁨extensions⁩/svg_fonts


image

(Just providing feedback! Not complaining…)

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It’s not a full alphabet, just the capitals (the semaphore has the numbers too)
Does seem to have splodged your DEPG together though? Weird, maybe the lower case letters has confused it

All caps on greek -
image

Can’t get Norse to work at all.

Wondering if @bill.m.davis might have some observations here.

How strange, guess we’re both working on it now :smiley:

Wonder why Norse just gives an error.

Edit - Chrome says:

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 15 at column 76: Specification mandates value for attribute crossorigin

I don’t use “Hershey” or other single-line fonts.

When I want to use something like that it is because it is small and simple. And in my experience those are bloated and complicated. So they do not fit my purpose.

I created my own tool to create what I needed:

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Issues found and fixed in DEPGreek, looks like it wasn’t moving on between letters so your letter clusters were caused by the space characters.

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The error is coming from this:

link rel=“preconnect” href=“https://github.githubassets.com” crossorigin

There you go!

image

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Wow wow wow. This broke my brain but ill have to read this again to do some learning. I have purchased a couple of fonts that ended up not working on Inkscape and now I wonder if this might be the issue too.