I am laser cutting table place names for my wedding and spent (waaaaay) too long setting up the file of names to cut, only to find out when I opened the svg file in Ruby on the laser computer, the design went, for lack of a better term, cray cray.
I thought at first it was the font not being installed on the laser computer, but all the elements of the design were (I’m pretty sure) converted to objects/paths so shouldn’t be a problem. Looks like the outlines stayed the same but the font converted to something standard. It also didn’t alert me to any missing fonts etc when the file opened.
The original file was taken from the induction ‘First Project’ (thanks @Brendon and Laser Techs!) to make it easy to work with. The annoying thing is it worked for my test print a month back for one name.
See below for two images of what it should look like and what it opens as.
I haven’t looked into the First Project files but looks like the font you used isn’t installed, or maybe not compatible with Ruby (not sure if the front end or back end of Ruby converts the font glyphs to paths for the laser cutter). For this reason, the font gets changed to a default available font. As far as I recall, SVG files are capable of embedding font data inside them but it’s uncommon to do so and probably not supported by Ruby either.
You mentioned you are pretty sure you converted the elements to paths but 100% this would not happen if you did it successfully. It will turn the text object into a plain drawn path and preserve the glyph (which is now a basic closed shape) which will work when importing to Ruby. Double check that. If you double click on the text object in your editor, does it let you alter the text? If so, it is still a text object that has not been converted to a path.
When I save from inkscape to svg, it always asks if I want to embed the font, which should avoid this problem. So try opening your file in inkscape on your computer, save it as a new svg and select ‘embed font’.
Thanks all. I think I have a few options to solve this problem, much appreciated.
I will follow the below process and test after each one and share where I went wrong for future users.
Step 1: check font has been converted to paths
Step 2: save svg file and embed
Step 3: install font on computer (@lasertechs will i have the correct permissions?)
Step 4: burn everything
I mean, it is possible to embed font data via CSS within SVG files, but it’s understandable why applications don’t do it natively, it’s bulky and ugly. The image here is an SVG file, feel free to look at source.
But best practice is to finalise a design and convert to path as mentioned before.
