Celtic Knot Font issue

[bcondon]

Good friends would like me to cut a 2D, VCarve Celtic knot. They purchased a font and it looks great in word and Wordpad, but in partswork2, its a little less pretty.

The two atachements shows what it should look like (in wordpad) and a jpeg of what partwork2 is seeing.

The company said this is the best font for cutting w/ NC.

With this crew, 3 of you did this and forgot the information of what I continue to learn.
I have asked to go back to the company an look at the fonts and ask them...

Thanksgiving was a joyous time at our house... way to much to be thankful for.

I only have the font and the font in bold. Inverse is available as is a couple other options

any thoughts or guidance.


[I like screws too but I am afraid of being call
Zing-Bob) 8-)

thanks
Bob

[navigator7]

Bob wrote The two atachements shows what it should look like (in wordpad) and a jpeg of what partwork2 is seeing.
...but left off the attachments....
Dangit Bob!
;-)

[bcondon]

Sorry... Thinkin qbout the lottery ticket I need to buy... If I win big, I am not sure who to share it with though, cuz you only need so much money...


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[bcondon]

Each line is made up of a alpha caracter position
and I think what is happening is that there is a spaceing between lines... I could not find if that could be removed when putting in the text

[shoeshine]

Looks like you are going to need to do some clean up of the vectors to use that font anyway as the characters split between them and will do some funky things to your Vcarve pathing.

2 strategies I can think of;

Type it out at the largest size you can get an image of in a word processor (or better yet in corel/illustrator if you have acess) save as bitmap then trace in PW. (high rez is key to this)

manualy merge/clean up the vectors

[tporter1001]

If you have acess to Autocad, you can type the text and if you have the express tools installed
you can then explode the text and then it becomes
just polyline. Then you can edit it anyway you
want.

[rb99]

Weld command?

[myxpykalix]

bob first let me say i'm not 100% sure of what you want to do but i think you want to write words using this character which is a keltic knot right?
If your example is what you see on the right above then what i see, and could be wrong, is that each letter represents a specific keltic design and each letter (design) is self contained with closed vectors.
Some letters look like they intersect similar to a cursive font and some don't.

First it looks like you would have to do like you would do with text is to adjust your kerning (space between letters)so they look as they intersect to keep the design flowing.

Then looking at your pic here i hilited some of the many intersections you would have to node edit to delete to make it one object instead of several individual ones.
If i'm wrong please someone correct me, so i can learn something from this too.

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[bcondon]

First, I do not have access to Illustrator, corel, or autocad.

The issue is that to make picture, you use:

QkwwjWkwwj%kwwjWkwwjE
Gssss2sssssssss2ssssH
Z,xxmX,xxmT,xxmX,xxmC

using the celtic font.

The spacing between each line (Paragragh adjustment in word) has some fixed amount in partwork2... I will call the hotline to see if that can be set to zero as in word or wordpad.

The goal of the project after cleanup is to vcarve the pictire to get sharp corners.

So a couple things I will try is to create the picture and use paint to get it to size, the trace the jpeg file... I did this before from a picture, scanned it in, and had to adjust to being horizontal.

Another thought is to turn the picture above, convert the text to vectors, then clean up by moving vectors around.


Any oher thoughts?

This is a good project as a learning project...

Thanks
Bob Condon

[zeykr]

Could you export and post an .eps of this so we can play around with it?

[Brian Moran]

Bob,

You will not be able to set the line spacing to less than zero in PartWorks, though you can reduce it with the 'Edit Text Spacing' tool next to the text entry icons. You could split the text block into individual lines using the 'Break Text Into Lines' command off the right mouse menu and then nudge the lines together. However at the end, you are still going to have a large amount of editing to combine the individual characters together to make continous boundaries to machine within.

You could also lay this out in word and export it as a PDF to load into PartWorks - you would still need to edit the character outlines though.

As has been suggested above, if I was doing this I would export as high a resolution bitmap as possible from another package and trace the bitmap in PartWorks to get the closed vector outlines.

Brian

[myxpykalix]

Bob,
If by using the font you are NOT trying to spell a specific word then why use the fonts to create a design?
If all you want to do is cut a celtic knot design then rather then going to all the trouble of using the font, ect there are other alternatives.
You can go to barnes and noble book store and buy a dover publications book with a cd of celtic knot designs. You can go to www.doverpublications.com (http://www.doverpublications.com) and order it if you don't have a bookstore close.

Or go here and create one online:
http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/knots/mkknot.htm

[bill.young]

Years ago I had an idea for what I thought at the time was a neat was to do celtic knot patterns. I figured that there were only a limited number of possible shapes and ways they could intersect, so I drew all the basic shapes that I could think of and created an "array" of pieces that could be used to create patterns to vcarve.

I never did much with it after that but if someone could figure out the "language" of the ways that they can fit together then they could be used like a CAD version of Bob's font.

You can see a drawing of the pieces on Flickr at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/seaside5592/4146961077/

and if you're interested in playing with what's most likely an overly-complicated way to do celtic knot designs, you can download a zipped dxf file and PartWorks crv file at

http://www.shopbottools.com/LabFiles/sb_labs_files/celtic_knot.zip

Bill

[bcondon]

Hey Brian,

will try output -> PDF from word and import into Partworks...

Sounds promising because word has the font representation correct.


It is the customer who provided the font and design.

I like Bill's idea. Having been a cad programmer just before dirt was created, I would have worked with n/c code directly.

I need to grab the free C compiler from Microsoft... or use Excel to build it...

thx

BC

[bill.young]

It seemed to me that doing it as blocks in CAD made a lot of sense, but it's pretty fussy to get them to work together. There are some pieces in my array that aren't quite right yet and some missing ones, but with any luck it'll be food for thought for someone.


Bill

[bcondon]

Bill,
actually if partworks had "patterns" which are named pieces say for making a BOM view, then your idea would be perfect because you could control the connection points, scaling etc.

To the rest...

SO, I built the font from Word and printed to a pdf format. Brought it into Partwork and it looked pretty good.

Saved the image on LEVEL "BASE" in green and locked it.

made a copy of some of the common repeatable areas and put that on level 1, turned off Level BASE, and started my cleanup which included joining common areas together and extending lines to touch each other.

I had always used JOIN VECTORS from the right mouse button but many times it gets the start/end point confused when joining BUT I FOUND JOINING in the ICON Pallette on the left.
You simply select all the vectors and hit join and this craeted sets of closed vectors....

......beautiful.....

Create a level called DONE and copy the common vectors there. Make a group out of all the common vectors. Turn on level BASE (which is green in color) and now Cut/Paste and position the common vectors over the repeatable green (level base).

Finish up with the final Non-common area cleaning.
Ungroup everything on Level DONE, turn off all other levels

---now working on the VCarve NC stuff---

SO the little glych here is that I do a select all vectors, choose VCarve with a V bit... I think partsworks is getting confused because every now and then it starts off the workpiece and makes 10" deep grooves all over the pieces.

When I pick each close vector set, it does the right thing so I have a feeling that it sometimes chooses the outside of the closed vector space and goes for a ride. I think I will need to choose each closed vector space, and then create a path... It is very consistent when it errors out and that always happen with Select All.

Hope to cut in the next day or so...

[rcnewcomb]

quote:When I pick each close vector set, it does the right thing so I have a feeling that it sometimes chooses the outside of the closed vector space and goes for a ride. I think I will need to choose each closed vector space, and then create a path... It is very consistent when it errors out and that always happen with Select All.
This is usually a symptom of overlapping or looped vectors. The software tries to do some error detection but it can become "overwhelmed" if there is too much to process at once. It sounds like you've already found one work-around -- toolpath smaller sections at a time.

[kfitz]

I did this in Rhino. No problems encountered. Curious as to how it will import into PW2 since I don't have it.
Celtic Design

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[navigator7]

Kevin,
What is an .ai file?
Adobe Illustrator?

[navigator7]

Never mind, Kevin.
Figured it out.

7964

[navigator7]

BTW.....The over all design came out to 346 inches in my program.
LOL
;-)

[kfitz]

I found that ai format from Rhino always gave better results in PW than dxf. As far as the size, I simply left the text at Rhino's default size of 10". Since the design is three lines high, the height should be 30", but that's one of the nice things about vector formats; size doesn't matter.

The issue that Bob may have been experiencing is all the duplicate lines, as well as the small vertical and horizontal pieces that close each section where the letters meet. I used Select Duplicates to find and delete the dupes, but I had to manually delete the little edge pieces. Took about 10 minutes. The Celtic knot font is great, but it is not quite as "automatic" for CNC work as the company would have you think.

[myxpykalix]

I've not cut a celtic knot but based on the above picture of chucks wouldn't a celtic knot be more accurately portrayed if it was done in a basketweave continuous pattern as opposed to all those individual pieces? My thought was that a celtic knot was supposed to look like one continuous piece or is this a variations to the theme?

[kfitz]

Jack, based on the above flat picture, you are correct. But if you v carve this same design, you will find that the eye fills in the details and the result is a fairly good illusion of one continuous piece. Cut one and you will see.

[myxpykalix]

"you will find that the eye fills in the details"
....not MY eyes!

I know what you mean, sometimes you have to look at a design from a distance because looking at it close up you don't see the same thing.

[bcondon]

Cut the font last night and friend is extremely happy. I need to rotate 90 degress because it will be in a raised panel in a larger panel system that makes up a 3 season porch...

and then cut it 19 times