Text for laser cutting

Weld the letters first

Script and display faces are built from contours that overlap their neighbours. Left alone, the laser cuts every internal seam and a joined-up word falls apart into fragments. The weld option unions the outlines so the word becomes one continuous profile — cut once, in one pass.

Cut lines versus engrave lines

Fill emits the letterform silhouette, which is what you want for a through-cut. Outline emits a band of the stroke width as real geometry, giving you both edges of a scored or engraved line instead of a centreline the controller has to interpret. Both together give the filled letter plus its surrounding band.

Getting the size right

Export DXF and the unit is written into the file, so the drawing opens at the intended size instead of needing a scale guess at the controller. Font size is a geometry-unit height: at millimetres, 100 is a 100 mm cap. SVG works too when your software prefers it, and it keeps colours for layer-to-power mapping.

• DXF with a declared millimetre header for LightBurn, RDWorks and most CAM front-ends.
• One layer per letter when you need to sequence or suppress individual glyphs.
• SVG with per-glyph ids and colours when your workflow maps colour to cut settings.

Questions

Why do my letters cut into pieces?

Overlapping contours that were never welded. Turn the weld-contours option on and the overlaps dissolve into one outline, which is what makes connected script cut as a single piece.

SVG or DXF for LightBurn?

Either imports, but DXF declares its unit in the file, so the size arrives correct without a scaling step. Use SVG when you want colour-coded layers for different power settings.

Does it handle stencil-style text with bridges?

Not automatically — bridging is a design decision. Pick a stencil typeface from the catalog, where the bridges are part of the letterforms.