InkStitch - Geneva-simple typefaces

Draft

This page describes how we created a simple Hershey font.

Planned procedure:

Creation of a rounded satin font

Creating an embroidery font by hand is a fairly complex endeavour. However, starting from so-called Hershey font is much simpler since they are made of strokes.

In InkScape, Hershey fonts are available through the Extensions -> Render menu. We will use the simple Sans 1-stroke' font.

Configure a 1 stroke font

Create a Hershey glyph table

• Menu Extension -> Render -> Hershey Text
• Change Action to "Write glyph table"
• Font face: Sans 1-stroke

Adjust the size and arrangement

• Select all
• Set total width to 210mm. This creates glyphs that are about 8mm high, i.e. good fonts to use with embroidery patches.
• Delete all the doubles
• Arrange the glyphs in the table

Hershey 1 stroke font table

Change stroke width and type

• Select All
• Set Stroke Width to 1.5mm
• Set Cap to round (easier to deal with than rectangular strokes)
• Verify shapes, smooth some (I fixed $, @, &, 0, O, Q4 and make strokes smaller ($, @).

Rounded caps and stroke width = 1.5mm

Transform the stroke-based fonts into path

Break glyphs into several path

• Select all
• Change the stroke color to light blue (because this way you can more easily see what is going on in the next steps)
• Menu Path -> Break apart

Some letters are now composed of several path

Transform the strokes to paths

• Select all
• Menu Path -> Stroke to Path

You now should have Glyphs with Paths. These for the moment just have fills.

• Select all
• Add a black stroke, make it about 0.2mm

1-Stroke-based R - Broken R - Stroke-to-Path broken R

Fix each letter

For each glyph, there will be two major tasks

• Remove excessive overlaps
• Make sure that each sub object is made of two subpath

For each letter that has major overlaps, delete segments of overlapping path

• Select the letter with a rectangle
• Optionally give different colors to different segments
• Hit F2 (Edit Path tool)
• Select segments in the tips of some path and kill them.

You also can recombine some path.

• Group all objects into one glyph group
• Create two subpath
• Verify directions of subpath
• Add rungs

• Remove Fill
• Set Stroke Paint
• Set Stroke Width to 0.1mm

Using Illustrator

One could import the SVG file to illustrator. Its pathfinder tool can remove all major overlaps (or is there a way to do it in Inkscape ?). Save as SVG in Illustrator and repopen it in InkScape

A simple fill font

After the first step explained in the above chapter, simply create a path (before breaking up the glyphs !)

• Break apart symbols that have unconnected polygones, e.g. !, ? ;
• Menu Path: Stroke to path
• Set the fill
• Remove the stroke

In Extensions -> Embroidery -> Params

• Augment the density, e.g 0.2
• Add an underlay

We had to fix some caracters, i.g. remove or union some little garbage and also give some special treatment to the $ and & signs.

You can download the following SVG file (click until you get the SVG then save the page as). Open the file in InkScape and copy/paste the fonts. Make sure to hide the embroidery layer, and to "rectangle" select since we did not do any grouping...

Simple Hershey sans font with fills (click 2x to get the SVG)