Rastering small words into wood?

[Allan Longson]

Looking for some clues as to how others may have got good quality, like clearly readable, letters etched into wood in a SMALL font size - font size 8 and under. Using a VLS 6.60, Corel X7, latest drivers, new top quality optics, new laser cartridge, new belts, 2" focus, etching into a rimu veener.
With a true type font like arial and a font size of 8 I can't get small letters to etch clearly into a wood surface. I've tried throughput settings 5, 6 and 7 (high quality) with mixes of speed and power. At 5, the letters etch but if you have letters like an I or an l, these type of letters do not etch properly (are faint or not properly etched). At 7, the letters etch but the etch is too deep and you then end up with letters losing their definition as the etch borders run into each other because of the shape of laser beam. At 6 you get both situations happening. Adjusting the speed and power up and down doesn't change the end result, either the letters do not clearly etch or the etch is too deep. What I can't get is a shallow etch that is clear for every letter. It's even worse if one uses a fancy font like Shelley Allegro, the thin lines in the font just do not etch properly unless the power is high or quality is high (and therefore a really deep etch).
I'm etching logos so the font, size etc has to closely match the writing on the logos and I can't upsize or stretch the font. I have experimented with different fonts and the whilst the problem varies in how bad it shows up, it is there for every font I have tried.
So can anyone recommend a setting for power / speed / quality or any other of the raster settings or is this just an inherent laser problem that as you go smaller the quality falls away? Maybe if I convert the letters to a bit map so it takes out any font driver issues with either Corel or Universal?

[Scott Shepherd]

Have you tuned your laser lately? If not, you need to go through the tuning process. There's no reason it shouldn't do what you want it to do. My guess is your tuning is off. There's a canned cycle for doing that, you just open up that area, put some material in and follow the steps.

[Lee DeRaud]

Maybe if I convert the letters to a bit map so it takes out any font driver issues with either Corel or Universal?

Doing "convert to curves" on the text objects will handle that directly in Corel and still allow you to scale the overall drawing.

But as Scott said, it should not be a problem. You say you're etching into veneer: how thick? I'm guessing when you say the etch is too deep, you mean it's blowing through to the substrate...that may just be the nature of the beast.

[Mike Null]

With your machine and optics I believe you should be able to engrave down to 3 or 4 point type sharply. I typically use 500 dpi as my resolution for engraving into wood. I don't know what that equates to on your machine. With script fonts you may have to outline them or convert to curves and manipulate them a bit. But first follow Steve's suggestion.

[Ross Moshinsky]

I can tell you with my VLS 6.60 60w with a newish tube and optics, if you want detail, you have to turn down the power. I engrave a decent amount of black/gold laser aluminum. When I first got the machine I'd run at 50pwr 100 speed, which would leave a brighter finish with less polishing. When doing this I found on detailed logos that I did easily on my LS100 30W, the ULS would look poor. Upon testing I found if I dialed the power way back to something like 12-15%, I'd get similar quality. Obviously this is indicative of more power = wider beam. My LS100 obviously puts out half the power of the ULS, but I've never suffered from this problem when changing the power from 10% to 100%. I think it's just one of the many "downsides" with the ULS machine.

So long story short, if you want to get detailed engraving, you may want to turn down the power and do two passes. 8 point font really isn't that small, but I'd still apply the same principle. Potentially slowing the machine from 100% to 85-90% could also make a decent difference.

[Kev Williams]

Should be no reason you can't get decent detail out of your Universal on wood--

For fun, I just did a test with all 3 of my lasers... and I just used a piece of 2 x 4 I had laying around...

Here's the pics, the whole piece and a closeup. First thing to notice is that even my 1300 x 900 Triumph 'cutting' machine
gave me reasonably good results at 5 points. Next, the first Explorer engraving below the Triumph's I did at 60% speed,
which was simply too fast. Also, I didn't position it correctly (oops), so I changed the speed to 25%, which would more
closely match the Triumph's depth. Note the triumph was running essentially the same speed as my 2 metal
machines, but got that deep at only 18% power. As usual, my LS900 wins the 'tightest beam spot' award, I know that
it has a beam collimator, and I assume it's a good one because this machine's always had a very tight beam spot.
My point being, if my machines can do it, even my dumpster-sized Triumph, your ULS should have no problem...
--and fwiw, my "600dpi" refers to LINES per inch, not DOTS per inch...

[Yuriy Karpov]

if the material doesn't hold fine engravings well I'd just do a hairline outline of the engraving to sharpen it up.

[Bert Kemp]

When I was thinking about making a website for engraving I messed around with veneer trying to design a business card. this is very thin veneer probably 1 mm or less I did this at 30% pwr and 325 mmps speed on my 60 wattbus card (Copy).jpg So your machine should have no trouble

[Allan Longson]

Doing a hairline doesn't help if the middle isn't etched. I have tuned the laser, that did help with the sharpeness of the letters, thanks.
But the missing letters still occur. Here is an an example, this was etched at 15% power, 25% speed, 800dpi on level 7 (high quality), normal raster, manual adj off. Top and bottom lines etched ok but the ll in college on the middle row, it has just plain------ it up and it does this regardless of what settings I use. By recollection this was size 6 arial font. So you can see my despair, how can you trust the thing to etch a job you want done when it starts missing letters out. Going to send this off to my local rep and see what he thinks of it.

IMG_20160406_130759.jpg

[Lee DeRaud]

Doing a hairline doesn't help if the middle isn't etched. I have tuned the laser, that did help with the sharpeness of the letters, thanks.
But the missing letters still occur. Here is an an example, this was etched at 15% power, 25% speed, 800dpi on level 7 (high quality), normal raster, manual adj off. Top and bottom lines etched ok but the ll in college on the middle row, it has just plain f####d it up and it does this regardless of what settings I use. By recollection this was size 6 arial font.

That's very odd...seems unlikely a hardware failure would be that specific. It's almost like the thing where a line gets changed from hairline to something wider, not enough to show on the screen, but enough to make the driver ignore it while vectoring. Or those two letters look black, but the color is enough off to make the driver think it's something else. Did all the text show up in the viewer/control-panel (can never remember what it's called) before you sent it to the laser?

Did you try the 'convert to curves' thing? As I recall, there were versions of the ULS printer driver that didn't like some flavors of font (i.e. TrueType vs PostScript vs whatever) but I thought they fixed that.

[Allan Longson]

The letters show up fine in the viewer prior to running the job. I thought of a possible colour issue and changed the colour of the font (from black rgb to green rgb) and rerun the job, same issue. I didn't know that the ULS printer driver had issues with flavours of font, maybe this is a carry over.
I haven't tried turning the text into an object yet, will give that a go next.

Also with regards to the pic posted, The same font copied elsewhere on the page and then rerun using a different setting eg image quality 6 with different speed and power, will sometimes print all the letters fine but sometimes not print all the letters fine. So that kind of eliminates colour issues, imho its a driver issue and hopefully ULS can shed some light on it.

[Kev Williams]

I have a question-- Have you tried using a different version or Corel? I ask because my BIL (who now owns my old ULS) has X6, and no matter what settings we've tried, or color palette changes, virtually ANY small text sent to the ULS from X6 engraves as if the laser beam changed into a hacksaw. Bumpy edges, lost detail, etc etc-- I believe I even posted up a question about this issue a year or so ago..? But send the exact same job over using X4, and the engraving is pristine. Since I bought the ULS in 2002 we've fed it via Corel 9, 10, x3, x4 and x6. All older versions, the engraving is fantastic. Totally clueless about why, since no one else has ever brought it up. Maybe we're not alone? If you have an older version of Corel, try it...

[Allan Longson]

Converted the text to curves, at the settings it fails on as text (throughput 7, power 15, speed 30) it also fails as a curve. So I take a rectangle, size it to the l, overlay the 2 l's, delete the 2 l's from the text, merge the objects and then reprint, volia, the l's (or rectangles as they now are) etch fine.

[Lee DeRaud]

I have a question-- Have you tried using a different version or Corel? I ask because my BIL (who now owns my old ULS) has X6, and no matter what settings we've tried, or color palette changes, virtually ANY small text sent to the ULS from X6 engraves as if the laser beam changed into a hacksaw. Bumpy edges, lost detail, etc etc-- I believe I even posted up a question about this issue a year or so ago..? But send the exact same job over using X4, and the engraving is pristine. Since I bought the ULS in 2002 we've fed it via Corel 9, 10, x3, x4 and x6. All older versions, the engraving is fantastic. Totally clueless about why, since no one else has ever brought it up. Maybe we're not alone? If you have an older version of Corel, try it...

Oh great...I just realized I haven't engraved any text since I "upgraded" from X4 to X7.

[Lee DeRaud]

So I take a rectangle, size it to the l, overlay the 2 l's, delete the 2 l's from the text, merge the objects and then reprint, volia, the l's (or rectangles as they now are) etch fine.

I'm glad you have a solution, but we're no closer to determining the root cause of the problem, especially since there are two identical(?) l's in the next line down that work fine as text: need to figure out what's different between those two lines of text.