I gotta admit V Carving can be very addictive! I wanted to take the lyrics of a song; one of my moms favorites, and create a plaque. I noticed that when I used smaller fonts, (to fit the plaque), while they are clean and sharp; they tend to be hard on the eyes, because characters are tightly spaced. I’ve tried San serif fonts and it still feels a bit cluttered, or at least to me it appears that way. I’ve surmised that this is due to the lack of greater em space. I see that vectric aspire allows for some level of kerning, but only on a character by character level, it does not allow for universal paragraph kerning, per se. Since my application calls for lyrics to a song, you can see how long and tedious the em space adjustments can become. So, I beg the question: is there a better way to pop “em space” between characters in aspire when using the text tool? Hmmm… points to ponder.
Affinity Designer allows you to adjust kerning and line spacing in unit increments (pixels, mm, etc). I know that’s probably not a ton of help if you are working in Aspire, but I only know as much as I know.
I’ve just started v-carving myself and my current workflow is text/design in Affinity Designer, export as SVG, import into sketch in Fusion, do CAM.
Here’s my first successful v-carve (a nameplate for my wife’s co-worker) which was then flooded with opaque epoxy.
Totally understand! I did a quick Google (which I’m sure you’ve already done) and I didn’t see any quick methods for kerning bulk text. There were some suggestions about putting each letter in a bounding box and then you’d have the ability to space those boxes with more granularity but that sounds like twice as much work as what you were already doing!
I did try these options, stretch kerning, stretch characters. The options are pretty basic and non selective, they are non granular and are weak. Perhaps in the next version of Aspire we’ll get better line character spacing implemented.
Did you reach out to the Vectric folks about this?
That is probably not the response you wanted to hear, but they seem to be responsive and helpful. Plus if anyone would know if their software was capable of what you need it would be them.
Good luck, and please let us know what they say if you ask them.
That would be my last resort, I typically tap the good nature of the forum for their insightful offerings… If the resource turns up inconclusive, then I move on to the developers. This also affords forum members the benefit from similar experiences they might be having. It has only been five hours since the post’s origin. It’s early -
I know in Maker if you ungroup the text object then the letters can be selected one at a time then maneuvered as you’d like.
Just a thought that might help
Thanks Ron, I’m no avid Maker user, but I’m a huge Adobe illustrator and photoshop fan, their text handling is awesome. I’ve thought of just composing my text in AI after I’ve kerned my text and exporting as an SVG file for aspire. I’ll have to play with it and test my results.
Understood, and agreed.
I am amazed with the amount of knowledge and sharing that has already come from this small young forum, but was also very pleasantly surprised with the vectric folks, even though my issue was embarrassingly simple and silly, they were quick and professional.
I am curious to see the answer to your question as well, even though I am not there yet.
Hi Jenn,
I’m new to this forum and also to the CNC world. I’ve had my machine for a few months now. I thought I would throw out this suggestion and see if it would solve your problem.
Have you tried to create your song one line at a time?
Make a straight line as long as you need for each line of the song. You can reuse the same line.
Then Create each line as if you are putting text on a curve. (I know it is a straight line)
Then Adjust the Text Spacing for each line in the song.
I hope this helps you find a solution.
JohnnyJ1
Thanks for the suggestion, it is a viable solution. I was hoping to kern as a whole as in other text editing applications. Hopefully Vectric will add better text handling features to its suite of apps.
Hi Jennifer you may want to goto YouTube and put in “kerning bulk text in aspire” and look for “Mark Lindsay”. I watch him and he is excellent on aspire, I’ve learnt a lot about using aspire and using unknown special functions with program. Hope he has something that will help.
Hi Jenn, I believe Vectric just added what you are after to their new V11 Software Versions. You should probably still be able to upgrade for free if you are using V10.
