 Okay, so I recently started using a CNC machine and I wanted to make a sign with a font called Fruiterra So I can show you what that looks like And I just wanted this font to say quiet room. So here's Fruiterra this font and Now a CNC machine needs paths. So the way that you would normally get that is Type create outlines, you know a straighter and now if you look at this path you can see God a path that goes all the way around the text and a path on the inside of the text Easiest way to Illustrate that is to convert it to a stroke and now you can see CNC machine would go around these letters Around this letter problem is Say my I'm using a Eighth inch bit. So my stroke would be Point one two five. So if I want to make a sign With that eighth inch bit you can see this text is too small. So in order to Get something that would work I would have to make a much larger sign if I want anything smaller than that It's probably not gonna work and even then the the black is showing you where the bit is gonna route out of the Wood. So if I wanted to make that say not just an engraving but cut all the way through the wood This white area is gonna be my text inside the black and that's probably too thin. It's probably gonna break So it's not really a practical Method of making this sign. What would be easier is If just the black was a single path now a researched different ways to Convert text into a single path and surprisingly, there's very little out there that does it Apparently Corel draw can do it. I'm not sure how well essentially what it does is it Converts your text to a raster image and then it sort of traces the centerline of that raster image So it's sort of like live trace. It's not super accurate And also you can see here. Corel draw is four hundred sixty nine dollars Um, so Then I noticed that There's a plug-in for a program called inkscape inkscape is an open source program sort of like illustrator It's really great program not always super user-friendly, but A great option if you're looking for for something free And then if you go to this github repository, you can download this inkscape centerline trace so The problem with inkscape centerline well, there's a few things about inkscape centerline trace it relies on a Program for your computer called auto trace And it doesn't automatically install that And now you can install them in your inkscape directory, so It's not super intuitive where that is But if you go to your applications find inkscape And right-click here and you show package contents Go into the contents folder go into the resources folder Go into the share folder and go to inkscape and Now you'll see extensions and this is where you paste it. So Just paste it in here. You can see I've got centerline trace the INX centerline trace dot py and Now if I were to open up inkscape I Can take this file and Centerline trace it, but you can't just You know save out text as an SVG or as a font file And open it up in inkscape. I try to do that Centerline trace can be found under extensions images Centerline trace it brings up some options if hit apply it gets an error You know try object on group You can try that. It's not going to work What it needs is a raster image And so in order to that, you know, you would need to go into illustrator wherever you were typing this thing and Do and save it out as a as a JPEG or a GIF or a PNG So I'm going to go ahead and do that I'm already done it and now If I open that file that PNG file and select it and do extension extensions images centerline trace I Can trace the image I'm going to just leave the defaults for now so you can see how it works and You can play with these to see what works best for you This will take a while actually these aren't defaults like I changed this to 255 You can change this to one which is the default. I think it's super quick But that just basically runs a bunch of iterations to find the best centerline And you can see it has now Traced my font and it did a pretty Well, actually It doesn't do the best job. So you can see it turned it into something like comic sans. So I would have to go into Illustrator and clean this up. It might do better with other fonts. I'm not sure I had to go into illustrator and clean it up It didn't take long Arguably Might have been faster with this font to just draw the paths and illustrator myself But that is how you would get a single stroke font. So if I go now Into illustrator. It's a little easier to see And Open up this file that inkscape created You can see It's just a single path so If I were to CNC route this It would just follow this single path this single path, you know, it wouldn't have to we don't have to worry about the The width of the bit. It's just gonna be carving this out It's not gonna be carving sort of like a double line. So I can make my document much smaller without having to worry You can see it's at like 12 inches right now, but You know now it's that Six inches it's still fine you keep going down from there before it gets sort of too thick To do a good job carving Anyway, so that's how you centerline trace on a Mac in inkscape for CNC route