I have quite a bit of text that I want engraved on the surface of a machined part. My machinist has asked me to provide him with the centerline of the letters for him to follow in the CNC mill. I found the post here that suggests the following two methods:
- Create construction lines between the two lines that you want a midline between and connect their midpoints with a spline or straight line as needed.
- Offset one side of the pair to a different plane, loft a surface between the two lines, create a midplane between the original plane and the offset plane, and use the intersection of the surface and the midplane to get the desired midline.
However, both of these solutions are way too tedious for what I'm trying to do since there is a lot of text. I did try using the "OLF SimpleSansOC" font so that I could start from the midline and get the letters by offsetting that on either side (since there is no good way that I'm aware of to have a lofted profile follow all the various parts of a letter). However, it is once again way too tedious to tweak the letters from the original font to get them to look right when the text is offset. Furthermore, after the lines have been offset, there is still a good bit of clean up work to do.
Ultimately, I just want to know if there is some way to have a profile follow the lines of a stick font, or some other similar means of getting text engraved on a surface while also being able to send my machinist the (at least approximate) midline of that text for him to follow.