Notice that the type is now composed of single strokes. You now have monoline versions of your type. Next, select Image Trace Lineart If you want more control you can go to Window > Image Trace and select your settings from there with more control.Īfter you have the image traced as lineart, click expand in your upper toolbar to turn it into vectors. Go to Object > Rasterize and then click ok, the settings shouldn’t matter too much as long as you keep the resolution at 300. You just have to keep trying until you find thin, simple typefaces that work with this technique.įor this method, you need to take your text, finalize it, and then convert it to a raster graphic. The advantage of this method is even though your choices are narrow, you will still have some control over what typeface you work with. It is important you choose a thin type like Lato for this process. After some research, I’ve discovered two different ways of achieving this. If you need to score/engrave in a lot of text (like full paragraphs) and it doesn’t have to be flourishy monoline type can seriously speed up your process. Monoline type is text that is created with a single line or path.

and don’t want to wait an eternity for the text to engrave – then you will want monoline type. However, if you’re just trying to score some quick text for a jig, a ruler, etc. When you want your text to look EXACTLY like it does in illustrator, this is the method you want to use. Now the above technique will work great if you’re trying to produce something like the product below. Here you can see the converted text is still a shape with two outer “walls”

In illustrator if you want text to cut out as you’ve created it, you would create your text and then go to Type>Create Outlines Lato is a perfect, thin typeface for our tests Even with a very fine line type like Lato (above) – you will still get shapes instead of monoline type. The issue is that although single line typefaces exist, Illustrator doesn’t read them that way – it will always treat them like a vectorized shape if you set them to outlines.

Well, there is a third option – Monoline type. Up until today I was stuck with two options – engraving the text (slow), or setting it to outlines and complete cutting/scoring the outer shape of it (not good for small text, and not always what one is looking for). If you’ve been working with text on your laser cutter, cnc, or vinyl plotter you’ve probably struggled with HOW to actually cut the text in the simplest, most effective way.

Free single line font for cnc