MakerGear Forum

Hi All - What is the best way to create letters of a specific font into an STL file ?

Oh, the guys worked out a batch process for doing that to help out a neighbor of mine just the other day - (Definitely want to use a batch process.)

Now let me see if I can find it.....the odds are not good.

Update: Found it! Link below:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3328

Thanks Jules, I'm going to give this a read.

Make sure that you have a recent version of OpenSCAD. This makes use of the "text()" primitive, which is only in version 2015.03 and newer, a fairly recent (but much-needed) addition to OpenSCAD. Before that was a kludgy method involving an inkscape plug-in to generate DXF files compatible with OpenSCAD (which can be searched up on Thingiverse), and it works, but I don't particularly recommend it.

Tim wrote:Make sure that you have a recent version of OpenSCAD. This makes use of the "text()" primitive, which is only in version 2015.03 and newer, a fairly recent (but much-needed) addition to OpenSCAD. Before that was a kludgy method involving an inkscape plug-in to generate DXF files compatible with OpenSCAD (which can be searched up on Thingiverse), and it works, but I don't particularly recommend it.

Hey Tim, where's your favorite learning resource for OpenSCAD? They got a forum or tutorials anywhere? (I'd like to play with that some.) The Documentation they have on the site is extensive, but would take a ream of paper to print.

Ooop! Nevermind - found a couple of tuts on the site.

Jules wrote:Hey Tim, where's your favorite learning resource for OpenScad? They got a forum or tutorials anywhere? (I'd like to play with that some.)

Glad you found something, although I learned by looking at other people's examples, which I find is the best way to learn a programming language or anything similar. Eventually you learn that 90% of all OpenSCAD code is badly written (this is also true of any programming language), and eventually you come to an understanding of why the good code is good and the bad code is bad.

Found a couple of Youtube vids too - but there isn't really much available.....OpenSCAD is in dire need of a tech writer! (It's not that it's not in there, but it's really hard to find specifics. I'd like to never have found the import function without Ed's help earlier.)

On the other hand, free is good! No complaints.

Tim wrote:

Jules wrote:Hey Tim, where's your favorite learning resource for OpenScad? They got a forum or tutorials anywhere? (I'd like to play with that some.)

Glad you found something, although I learned by looking at other people's examples, which I find is the best way to learn a programming language or anything similar. Eventually you learn that 90% of all OpenSCAD code is badly written (this is also true of any programming language), and eventually you come to an understanding of why the good code is good and the bad code is bad.

Good code follows good editors.

Whenever there is a language, there is a package for atom: https://atom.io/packages/language-openscad

This may be too late but to me the easiest way to put letters of a particular font into an STL file is to use Sketchup and do Tools-> 3D text. It doesn't get more simple than that. You can use whatever font that Windows has.... and obviously you can download fonts to add to Windows.

Edit: I realized that Sketchup cannot open STL files natively. However, there is an extension in the extension warehouse that allows editing of STL. ... sorry for any confusion.