String inlay font with center points laid out?

[Roger Feeley]

Has anyone run across a font with the center points laid out for string inlay lettering? Wouldn't it be neat to just type your text in Word, enlarge it to the size you want to glue the paper to the wood?

[mike holden]

It would, but the font would have to be constructed of all segments of circles and straight lines. Comic Sans perhaps?

[Roger Feeley]

Steve Latta did a piece on the Woodwrights Shop where he did some nice serif letters. I have his dvd about lines and berries but he doesn't mention letters. I think it would be great even to have a font with some general guidelines built in.

[Greg Wease]

I have used a scrip-type font from Word as you suggest and added a hyphen at start and finish to help line it up. Like this:

-Roger Feeley-

Or you might try printing with a strike-through as a means of centering your letters.

As for the font, the fewer straight lines the better.

[Jim Koepke]

My college arts program had a class on lettering. We used various sized quills (pen points) for lettering.

The radiuses for serifs on a given size are usually the same throughout the alphabet.

I just tried a search for the booklet we used in class. I couldn't find it. So I looked in my library... I was looking for the wrong thing.

A Book of Scripts by Alfred Faibank, it has a little about letter design. It covers mostly history and other aspects of writing's evolution.

A font like TIMES is made up of mainly two line widths. With an edged pen there is the full width stroke and the thin stroke. There is a varied width when the pen transitions between the two.


Wouldn't it be neat to just type your text in Word, enlarge it to the size you want to glue the paper to the wood?

This is how I have done things for carving letters. It is actually an easy way to do this. The hard part is transferring the image from paper to the surface the lettering is to end up on. We used to use carbon paper or make our own with a soft pencil and transfer by outlining the desired lettering. If a stiff tracing paper is used, for signs we would use a pounce wheel to punch small holes in the paper around the letters and then use a small cloth bag filled with chalk dust to transfer the image.

jtk