Making engineering drawings of more complex shapes.

[richard4556]

Hi. I'm using a free copy of Coral Draw to make a graphic of a type font. It's easy, you use the Text Tool (which draws upon a font file somewhere on your PC), then you scale the size up to what you want. And the drawing of the font is smooth-lined. Even on large magnifications.

But the drawing is not an engineering drawing. So, I went and downloaded DraftSight.

I'm wanting to produce an engineering drawing of an official font in DraftSight. But, I'm not sure I can. Does anyone know if it's possible? I think if it is possible, you would have to insert a file. Thanks.

 

[richard4556]

Or, need a converter, from TTF to DWG.

 

[tr1ntx]

AutoCad in the past had a "Bonus Tool" or "Express Tool" to Explode Text. You could make a text entity in any supported font, then explode it, and it would become line entities, just like a regular object you drew. I don't think DraftSight has that command. If you know someone with AutoCad, maybe they can do it for you.

Another way is if you could get a .wmf (Windows metafile) of the character(s). I think you can import that and maybe make it line entities instead of text. Will CorelDraw export files as .wmf's?

 

[richard4556]

Actually, I've switched to Inkscape to "draw" a font character by using a Text Tool. Then I've saved as DXF. Then I've opened in DraftSight.

You have to do this though before saving in Inkscape:

* Convert the text to path (Ctrl+Shift+C),
* Ungroup the characters (Ctrl+Shift+G),
* Combining them back together (Ctrl+K)

The current problem is the quality of the drawing in DraftSight, unless I can do something.

When the drawing of the font is opened up in DraftSight, it's at a Drawing Unit of 120. So, the dimension line shows 120, (equavalent to 120mm in my system). Nice smooth lines.

The font needs to show as a dimension as 5, that is 5 mm. So, I scaled until the dimension line showed 5. But, the quality of the lines now low, not smooth.

So, I need to keep the scale as original, but my dimension line must show 5. How can I do that? Thanks.

 

[richard4556]

Actually, the dimension across the font needs to show 5 Cm.

 

[tr1ntx]

First, perhaps you can change the resolution settings to improve the display quality of the lines after you scaled down. I don't mean screen resolution, but I can't think of the proper term. There are settings that control how much calculating is required by your system.

Secondly, there is a scaling factor that can be applied to the dimensions, in your case 0.4167 (5/12). It is in the dim properties dialog box. There are two, one is the sie, the other is the units factor. That's the one you want. I don't have DS on this laptop, so can't look up these things.

 

[tr1ntx]

"Linear dimension scale" is the one that will multiply the measured value by a factor.