Hey guys,
I’m new to the CNC world. For the last 10 years all of my work has been done by hand with a Dremel. It’s nice to finally have the computer pick up the labor! So I’ve purchased a 6040 with the Mach3 software and everything is going nice and smoothly.
Because I’m importing fonts that I have created with my Paint Shop Pro 7 to Inkscape, I trace to bitmap/edge detection and save it as an SVG. When bringing it into Makercam, I can see that its reading the edge detection as 2 lines. These 2 lines are not visible in Inkscape, only Makercam as shown in my attached photos. I understand that once you remove the color, you are left with 2 lines.
And if I load this Gcode to Mach3, it obviously cuts both lines therefore ruining the cut. All that is needed is one traced line, that’s all.
What am I missing? I’m trying to figure out how to remove the inside second cut from the outline. This way it will be just a standard 1 line trace. Again, please keep in mind, I’m a total Noob! I’m sure this is a simple fix that I’m overlooking. So, any suggestions?
Thanks in advance guys!
Jen!
Welcome to the Forum!
Will this help?
Edit: Alternative but some work…
In nod mode select and delete the inner or outer nods. Don’t be scared if strange shapes show up. When the last inn/out nod is deleted it will look normal again.
This will probably work! Thanks so much! If it doesn’t work, I’ll come on back to let you know. But this looks to be my solution!! 
I found an addon to inkscape that takes the two lines and makes one in the middle automatically. It’s worked pretty good for me. I’ll have to look and see what it’s called.
Oh yes, please do! I’ve yet to try out the prior recommendation, so if I could get a few ideas to try out when I sit down later tonight, that would be great! Thank you so much!
I won’t be able to look until much later tonight but I’ll try to remember and let you know.
Yeah your not kidding, that’s some work! I’m playing around with it now. It’s difficult because once I pull all of the letters apart, it’s hard to place them back in their original location
It’s called Centerline Trace and can be found here: https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-centerline-trace
Scroll all the way down to see installation instructions and to see what it can do.
Awesome! I’ll try this later today and let you know how it worked! Thanks so much for the assistance
I had the same problem when I up loaded the svg file into makercam, as long as the outer line is not connected
with the inner line of the text, all you have to do is select the inner or outer line (which ever one you don’t want)
and press delete.
I had the same problem when I up loaded the svg file into makercam, as long as the outer line is not connected
with the inner line of the text, all you have to do is select the inner or outer line (which ever one you don’t want)
and press delete. hope this helps.
But how do you know which line is the correct scale? is it the inner or the outer?
It doesn’t matter which line you use, you would have to resize it to your needs anyway.
I first make sure the grid is in the right units (inch or cm) that I want, (upper right corner in makercan).
Select the object. then go into edit and click “scale selected” you might haveto play with it to get just the right
size you want. hope this all makes sense.
One more idea could be to try ‘single line fonts’ also called ‘stick fonts’.
A good explanation is found here: http://www.imajeenyus.com/computer/20150110_single_line_fonts/index.shtml