Single Stroke Fonts

[kenkpd]

I'm looking for a source of single stroke fonts.

A few single line scalable fonts would be great .

Anyone know of a site where I might download these
fonts?

I have tried the featurecam.com engraving fonts and they did not work for me. The download didn't distinguish between the actual letter to be cut and the tool move to get to the next part of the letter. They were both on the cutting path.

Thanks ....Ken Picou

[mikek]

http://www.dafont.com/search.php?psize=m&q=single+stroke (http://www.dafont.com/search.php?psize=m&q=single+stroke)

Don't know if this will work or not Ken.

[dana_swift]

What I have used successfully is the Hershey fonts.. however they are not Truetype. The Hershey fonts are free downloads, however you must write a program to convert them to SBP cut moves, Vectric does not support them (perhaps we should request that!)

You can take a peek at them here:
http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/idl_html_help/Hershey_Vector_Font_Samples.html

Hershey fonts were designed for plotting devices (like ShopBots!) and well suited to cutting engraving characters. They were created by Dr. A.V. Hershey of the Naval Weapons Laboratory and are in the public domain. (Free!)

They look just fine for my purposes.. then I am putting documentation on parts, not presentation engraving.

Here is the closest thing I can find for the "homepage" for hershey fonts:
http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/idl_html_help/About_Hershey_Vector_Fonts.html

Here is a C language interpreter and the glyph definitions all in the same source text file:
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/doxygen/Hershey_8C-source.html

Here is some Java code to read write and interpret the fonts: (you would have to adapt this to your purpose)
http://www.batbox.org/font.html

Hershey fonts cannot be converted to TrueType because a single stroke contains no area which is a REQUIREMENT of TrueType and PostScript fonts.

I have written a Hershey font handler in C#, it was pretty easy to do. (I also have written a TrueType font reader which was NOT easy to do.) Then I create most of my toolpaths from my C# code.

Hope that helps-

D

[dana_swift]

On second look, the C implementation above does NOT have the glyph definitions.. since it is public domain.. I have zipped up my source code for the glyph codes and tried to post it here. The Zip file is just over 50k so the forum will not allow me to post it. If you want it, I will happily email it to you.

The mapping between glyphs and character code sets for each typeface are also included in the same file.

To write a program in another language it should be trivial to copy and paste the glyph data into another source code file and interpret it appropriately.

<deleted attachment>

Also some additional information I have found on interpreting the raw glyph data so it can be plotted out as the characters we are looking for:
http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/current/Hershey.htm

Hope that helps-

D