Typophile

Any font without closed counters for a laser-cutting project?

Alessandro Bottoni0 votes

Hello Typophiles,
I'm searching a font without closed counters for a quite weird laser-cutting project. In particular, I need something like the Fortunata font by Balint Erdosi but in a Sans Serif style. Can you suggest any?

I have to laser-cut a quite large amount of ID plates and our CAD/CAM program is forcing us to manually remove the counters from each and every closed letter (P, Q, B, etc.). This is a slow and painful task even in a regular project but in this case it could kill the entire project because our plates are serially numbered: we would have to repeat the same manual clean-up for each and every plate of a virtually infinite sequence of plates. As a consequence, we do have to find (or create...) a font that does not require this manual clean-up.

Unfortunately, Fortunata is not the right font for us because we need a highly-readable San Serif one (as usual for ID plates).
Even worse, we cannot use one of our usual stencil fonts, like Boston Traffic or Stencilla, because the text has to be cut away from its original metal sheet and soldered to another support, where it must appear as embossed (raised) to resist to paint, grease, dirty and so on.

We will use capital letters and numbers, only. No need for lowercase letters, italics or anything else.

Any suggestion? Any easily readable font for such a project?

Thank you in advance

PS: My problem is quite similar to the one faced a few years ago by Grant Dunlop and explained by himself in this post: http://typophile.com/node/20375.

To better understand: you need a typeface which is stenciled at a bare minimum, so that no letter has closed counters, but still is in a single piece, right?

@riccard0: yes, I think this is a good description of our needs. We need to have each glyph in a single piece. Actually, we would like to have the whole text in a single piece, by sitting the individual glyphs on a common baseline. More precisely, we would like to have our 3D CAD project cleanly split between a single-piece foreground (the plate text) and a disposable, single-piece background (the mask with the empty space and the counters). This would ease our work a lot.

A possible example is Kenteken. Look at the open-counters O and R, for example. Unfortunately, Kenteken still has closed-counters letters (B, D and Q, for example).

BTW, we tried with a few common stencil typefaces (like: Stencilla, for example) and they did not do the job.

As you noted, in a stencil typeface the text is usually composed by the cuts (or holes) that you make in a mask (the stencil itself) and each glyph is composed by a variable number of separated elements. This would be a big problem for us because we would be forced to re-assemble each glyph from it parts on the new support and solder each fragment of each glyph to the common support individually. A painful puzzle for our installers.

At the moment, we are also looking at iArnold. As you can see, all of the text sits on a common baseline that act as the linking element but, still, we do not have a single-block mask. The counters are still separated elements. We would have to open each closed counters before using this typeface, not mentioning the fact that we would also have to convert it from its outline style to a solid (or "filled") one before using it to generate solid metal parts.

Thanks for your time and your attention

Alex, we’d be happy to modify type from our catalogue to fit your needs, or – if the budget allows it – create something new.

As Frode suggests, your best option is to create something that exactly suits your needs (either from scratch or modifying something existing).
How to do it, depends, among other things, on budget, time, workflow and expertise.

Yep, it looks like we need a custom-tailored solution for this project. I'm going to pass your contact to the people who can take decisions about those aspects of the project. Thank you for your help, anyway.

PS: The link to your catalogue does not work. I was able to reach your site tweaking the above link a little bit, nevertheless.

Looks like I forgot the https:// Typophile is not very forgiving. Fixed now.

A ready-to-go solution would be mixing letters from Konsens and Konsens Sten:
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/hubertjocham/konsens/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/hubertjocham/konsens-sten/

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