Posts tagged ‘font’
Cursives for Diecutters
New owners of digital diecutters often ask what are the best fonts for welding (or “connecting” if they haven’t been indoctrinated into our odd vernacular yet). We may give a few suggestions but usually brush them off with something about personal preference. It turns out that there are some fonts that are inherently weld-friendly thanks to their attentive typographers.
I set out to find a dozen or so that are nice looking, fool-proof for welding (as in, type and go; no tracking, kerning, nudging or schooching required, at least for the letter combos I tested) and, best of all, free. Here’s how they look typed out and then welded in preview. Gorgeous, aren’t they?
So here they are, for your welding enjoyment.
Lobster Two Bold and Lobster Two Bold Italic
Once you have typed your word or phrase, the letters should already be overlapping properly, so all that is left for you to do is click on the word or phrase so that the selection box appears around it and activate welding as follows:
In Silhouette Studio : Press the Cut Style button then press “Cut Edge”
In SCAL : On the Appearance section of the Properties palette click the Weld checkbox (unless it is already checked)
In MTC : Click the Weld button or press CTRL + W
It is recommended that you always do a cut preview to verify that any welding is as expected before cutting.
More free gel pen fonts
Now that the Silhouette SD has restored my faith in gel pen drawing with a digital diecutter, I’ve been testing various fonts for that single line look. To recap, many fonts will give a single line look at very small sizes (say a tenth of an inch high or less) but ones that look single line when drawn larger are harder to find. MTC has a cool feature to thin out regular fonts for a single line look but an algorithm is never going to match the aesthetics built in by a skilled typographer so the search continues.
I tested the fonts below with Staples mini gel pens, which have a very fine tip, in the Chomas Creations holder. You’ll get better results at smaller sizes and with broader tip pens such as metallic gel pens, for instance. A sample of my results are shown below. Click the image to enlarge it.
OK at ~ <1 inch tall
OK at ~ <.75 inches tall
OK at ~<.5 inches tall
OK at ~<.3 inches tall
OK at ~ <.25 inches tall
Free banner font
I’ve been playing around at Fontstruct some more and made a font for cutting alphabet banner flags in one piece. Seems that banners are quite trendy so I hope you will enjoy using this font with your diecutter. It is made to work at small sizes for your card and layout projects. The banner shown above was cut at 1 inch height. Click here to download.
Use uppercase to access the banner characters (red in the sample photograph), lowercase for plain. The backslash character (\)is a blank triangle while the vertical line character (|) is a shadow version of the blank triangle (blue in the sample photograph).
Fifteen Free Ornamental Wood Type Fonts
Whether you know them by wood type fonts, circus fonts, railroad fonts, western fonts or some other name, these decorative, 1800′s wood type inspired, shadowed typestyles are awfully popular these days. And they’re not just appearing alongside the expected themes, but in all kinds of applications with trendy craft designers like Teresa Collins and the shabby chic crowd leading the way. I couldn’t find a good list of freebies anywhere, so I made my own list. Hope you’ll find it helpful, too. Click on the font name to go to a download site.
Cast Iron
(Yellow Circus is a Lettering Delights Alphabet based on Cast Iron. The Cricut Imagine cartridge County Carnival features a similar font as well.)
Still more pre-filled gel pen fonts
All of these are available at fontspace.com. As with the last post, each is rendered at the largest size that will still appear filled in. I’m only printing a few letters of each now for these samples so as to save time and preserve ink.
More filled in fonts
Another batch of pre-filled fonts for your gel pen enjoyment. Be sure to test a letter or two with the font, size and pen you want before committing to the long drawing process. Take this from someone who has run out one gel pen in the process so far. When you look at the regular printed version of the font, you will see how very different they look rendered with gel pens, and this will help you learn to spot good candidates yourself.
Where to get them:
Scanografia (my fave!), YoYo and Needle are available at Fontstruct.com (free registration required).
Debonair Inline
Aria Penci Roman
HV Stripe ExtraB
YngreEBStripe
Pre-filled fonts for gel pens
I had a prior post where I gave a rather contorted procedure for filling in the fonts that you draw with Cricut markers, gel pens, etc. Today I had a better idea. Find fonts that already have a “fill” that works with the Cricut. So I tested a bunch of fonts with my gel pens and when one seemed promising, I reduced the size until the fill looked solid. Some look really nice with the crosshatch showing, as well. All of these are freebies from either fonts101.com or dafont.com.
Keep in mind that these take a long time to draw, so plan ahead. If you want to use markers instead of gel pens, there are many more options, or you can use the fonts above at even at larger sizes. Also see this previous post about single line fonts.
Video: Make a font in Inkscape
By popular demand, a video on how to create your own TrueType font with Inkscape.
Character map templates for Inkscape and Illustrator
Back in the day, there was a great free program for the Mac called TypeBook, which I used to print specimen sheets and character maps for my fonts. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the leap to OS X. I have been using an Excel spreadsheet to print character maps for my giant collection of dingbat fonts in the intervening years, but wanted to make something easier to use and to share. The result is my Inkscape version that you can download here.
And I also made a version for Adobe Illustrator that you can download here. Illustrator has a built in character table (Type menu>Glyphs), but if you want something to print out, this will come in handy.
Here’s what a completed page looks like for my 09kutups font.
Make a dingbat font with Inkscape
Buried in Inkscape .47 is the ability to make your own SVG fonts. This isn’t all that exciting because even Inkscape can’t use SVG fonts. However, pair this with a free font conversion tool and you now have a way to create your own TrueType fonts for free! The font creation features are not well developed yet, and there is precious little documentation, but after playing with this quite a while I have finally come up with a set of procedures that works. View/download the tutorial (PDF) here. View the video here. If you develop an original font for digital diecutters, please let me know so I can post it on my fonts page.
Related links
- fontstarter.svg file Inkscape file to be used with the tutorial
- Dingbat map webapp (Windows) for viewing your completed font
- Online Font Converter or Free Font Converter
- Inkscape documentation covering font editor
- See and download some example fonts at Denise’s Scrapbooking Room
