SOLIDWORKS 2014 includes a new font called stick font or single line font. Stick fonts are different from traditional fonts on your PC because they contain characters created from strokes made from single lines that terminate at the end of each stroke.
Traditional fonts have characters made from complete closed loops, so all characters are actually complex bubbles. This means strokes are formed by doubling up line segements to form enclosed spaces. The reason is so your operating system can fill the interior of the bubble, allowing for creation of many types of solid shapes. See Wingdings for example.
Although useful for word processing, traditional fonts are not useful for translation into objects that can drive machining processes, such as laser engraving, water jet and CNC maching. When traditional fonts are used for tooling paths, they force the tool to make two passes for each stroke of the character. This is wasteful and time consuming. Worse, it can cause bad results because of the double-pass.
Example of a traditional font:
SOLIDWORKS 2014’s stick font is meant to address this issue by removing the need for tooling path double-passes when machining text.
The new stick font is named OLF Simple Sans OC, created by OneLineFont.com. This font is designed to be used with the Sketch Text command to create text made up of stick letters. (Other stick fonts may be available from OneLineFont.com.)
Example of a stick font:
To use this new font:
Categories: Design, SOLIDWORKS, SOLIDWORKS 2014