Font swatches parametric | Luggage or baggage or filament tag customizable | Raised and depressed glyphs

What it is

An individual route for the quest of finding the best font for filament extrusion based 3D printing. A printed set of font cards also helps to find out which font might be the best for a project at hand and what quality is to be expected when printing it at a certain size. You could also test & torture your printer whith these. Stringing, retraction, extrusion rate - improper settings show up quite well.

Since swatches closely resemble tags, it is very easy to derive one from the other, so both are available here as customizable models.

How to use

Standard orientation is flat, font visible from the top. If you want to test a font printed on a vertical wall, just thicken up the base and stand the model on its side in your slicer. Voilà.

the .stl files

Import the desired files into your slicer, scale them right away and arrange them however it suits your needs.

• xy scaling:
  The font height (!) is 10mm, so it could easily be scaled to your desired size via xy-scaling in the slicer
• z scaling :
  Height is 0.4mm over all, 0.2mm for the first layer base, 0.2mm for the font containing layer. If you want different thicknesses, you need to upscale in z-direction and cut accordingly
• two color print:
  Just a matter of M600 or a PAUSE/RESUME command between the layers, easily done in PrusaSlicer

the .scad files

OpenSCAD is a free software for creating solid 3D CAD objects, compiled from code. If the code for a design is given, making small changes is just a question of editing values. Conveniently OpenSCAD has a built in custimizer for that. It even shows you the fonts (.ttf files) available on your system.

• If you haven't already, download & install OpenSCAD:
  • OpenSCAD - The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller
• Open the desired  .scad file
• Choose font to use (you can find them under “Help” → “Fontlist”)
• Edit parameters & variables as you please
• Preview model (F5)
• Render model (F6)
• Export .stl file (F7)

the .f3d file

Fusion360 is a comercial 3D CAD software, that currently is free to use for non-comercial purposes. Being one of my favorite CAD tools, it seems to not handle fonts properly. In my understanding of the current state, the font height is not a reliable variable between fonts and the text box isn't usefull as a base for a parametric design. [As of 21-10-2022]

Despite these circumstances a file is included here. It is a parametric design (so changing parameters is easy), but you may need to resize the model for a given font and type in the description of the used font manually.

• Import the file into a Fusion360 project and open it
• Customize the sketch “Font” for your purpose
• Adapt and rescale the sketch “Base” if neccessary
• Export in a sliceable file format

A word on fonts

What is meant by a font height (like of 10mm) ? To me that would be the maximum possible height difference of any defined character out of a given font, which usually isn't maxed out by letters and digits. Most of the times the “standard” glyphs are a bit smaller and only a few signs may reach the maximum height. A design software might understand that differently and would give different results - and that is the case. If you need to design a font to a certain size in your project, i suggest finding out how the software in question generates geometry based on fonts metrics.

SolidEdge 2021 was used for the attached .stl files and produces the following at 10mm font height:

Also to consider when using a font is, that not all are free to use in every situation. If you want to be on the safe side, use open source fonts. They are great anyway ;-)

Fusion 360 interpretes differently, font height also set to 10mm:

What next ?

There are lots of fonts, not all are covered here and for prints at a small scale many are not suitable. However, given a demand the list of available .stl here will grow over time. For OpenSCAD and Fusion360 more fonts (.ttf files - espacially free ones) can easily be found online. Good starting points might be:

Category:Open-source typefaces - Wikipedia and Browse Fonts - Google Fonts

Share your results, recommendable fonts or how a certain software handles fonts. Besides me, I am sure others would also appreciate that input.

Mentions

This model isn't a remix, although I wish I had stumbled on several models earlier on.

Worth mentioning would be salvador-richter's luggage tag and its nice remix here from AlwaysTinkering - from which i should have built my OpenSCAD code, had i found it beforehand…

Also Teque5's Font Swatches Tested & Ranked is an absolute service and encouraged me to create the parametric models that could be modified, printed and ranked by everyone according to his setup and needs.

Despite me being too stingy on filament to print them, I like Jeroen P's Filament Tag (customizable), which reminded me of a purpose that i wanted this model also to fulfill.