Reduce contour of body

[Groovechampion]

Hi,

I have created a text which i have cut from a body with success and printed it.

Now i printed the text it self with another color and wanted to clip in the letters into the cut letters, but they don't fit in.

Already tried different printer settings and scaling but that doesn't work as expected.

Is there an easy way to reduce the contour of a body, so that the letters don't get scalled but become a bit thinner.

It's just something like 0.1mm on each border.

[chrisb]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

You can create a clone of an object and scale it in each of the dimensions X, Y, Z separately. However, this is not sufficient for characters such as "A". What you need is an offset, for whch you can try the offset from Part workbench or if it is sketch based, there is a macro doing some offset. It often needs manual refining though.

[Groovechampion]

Hi and thx for the welcome.

I tried the 3D offset in part wb but nothing changes.

I created a shapestring and extruded it in part wb. I can export it to an stl file which goes into cura, but if I use the offset function nothing changes.

[TheMarkster]

Try to 2d offset the sketch or shapestring in part bench, and then pad or extrude it. You can use a negative value for the offset.

Snip macro screenshot-f6ad2b.png (81.8 KiB) Viewed 1099 times

This is prone to failure, so keep trying different settings in the dialog until something works. In Windows I get exception messages sometimes in the report view. I think in linux this sometimes crashes freecad. Save you work and save often.

[Groovechampion]

Thanks, already taken this way with some success.

Some letters work e.g 'H B i y', some letters e.g. 'a p' make freecad crash on Mac as soon as i enter negative numbers.

Will have to try in windows. Maybe they will work there.

An offset of -0.2 works like charm for me. They click in as expected.

Hoping to fix the crash in windows, as it should be Happy Birthday...

[Groovechampion]

Can't find a way to offset 'a p d'. All the other letters are printed and fit in very well.

Tried on v0.19 in MacOS and Windows, and also on v0.17 in Linux.

Can someone confirm this with the font 'Pumpkin Pancake'? It's a free downloadable font.

Tried different offsets, but as soon as i enter a negative value, Freecad crashes or throws an error.

[chrisb]

You can use Fontforge (great program btw.) to check the font.

[Groovechampion]

So today I compiled latest build of Freecad from github (v0.20) with selfcompiled open cascade v 7.5.0 and guess what, still freecad crashes at letter 'a p d'.

Any other chance to edit the contour to make them fit like the other letters?

[chrisb]

Any other chance to edit the contour to make them fit like the other letters?

Did you check the font?

You can try to do the offset manually by creating one or more sweeps, where you take the outline of the character as path.

[Groovechampion]

Installed frontforge and opened the font, but as I have never worked with this software yet, I don't know what might be wrong.

When I checked the font it said that at each letter there is a missing of amplitude, whatever that means. But as all the other letters I needed work, I don't know what difference I should look at.