The original PostScript (Type 1) fonts had no problems with those; see, e.g., an old version of Courier.

I must admit I've never seen any other; this link states "stroke-only" fonts are "no longer supported" (2005).

Thank you for the response.

There are a few fonts that are based on the principle of a single vector path which has had a stroke width applied to it (in Illustrator, or in FontLab via the "Make Parallel Path" command). You might be able to find a type designer who had kept the original working paths, and work from those.

Back in ye Olden Days when I worked in a prepress shop, we supplied our trophy-making clients with DXF files to run their routers, exported from CorelDraw. I had to wing it with these, since my knowledge of DXF was zilch (and still pretty much is), so I drew the letters myself. A lot of my current fonts--at least, those designs that are amenable-- are still based on the "centerline" method.

FWIW, here's a program which converts TTF fonts to single-line...

http://www.sharewareconnection.com/font-2-dxf.htm

I can't vouch for it, but it's an option.

Here's a recent thread about an open source stroke-only font.

Thanks for the responses folks. I'm strongly encouraging my client to laser his molds rather than CNC'ing. I've advocated this because of the higher resolution of the laser. The CNC router guy's smallest bit is .050" and the laser is more like .015" - much nicer. These difficulties with monoline fonts only helps make my case that the laser is a better solution. :)

Using an older version of Fontographer (4.7 or earlier), you can make such as font and generate it in PostScript Type 3 format. No idea whether any applications or operating systems still support this format, though. Seems like most or all support for Type 3 was dropped by the end of the nineties.

Mark - Are you sure it is possible to have a single vector going down the stroke of the letterform? Example: a majuscule I when converted to outlines in Illustrator would be a single vector, not two parallel lines (well, four if you count the top and bottom caps).

Type 3 fonts supported almost anything you could do in PostScript, except for color and some other things that were added later. This would include stroked paths. Letterror's Beowolf font, which randomly moved points around each time you printed, is an example of the sort of thing that was possible with Type 3. You could even make a "clip art" font that included different shades of gray, etc.

The problem is that this format is obsolete, as far as I know. If there is still software that supports it, I'm not aware of it. Of course, old software still supports it, if you can find it and run it.

A big problem with stroke fonts is that you need some way to express modulation of that stroke, or else you get pretty cruddy results. For example, it's important to be able to have thinning where a round stroke meets a separate curved stroke (as in the lowercase "d"). The reason that there aren't many formats around that support them is that unless one makes the format super-complicated, they produce rather poor results.

Cheers,

T

Thomas: While you are correct that the results may not look that great without modulation, these sorts of fonts are used when there are hardware limitations based upon the output device.

If you have an old-fashioned pen plotter, in most cases you simply can't modulate the stroke. In other situations, you may have to physically fetch another tool, and you will have a limited set of tool sizes available.

When I'm making printed circuit boards, my CAD software uses a font like this. It is not a very pretty font, but it is fine for the kind of short single words you use.

Looking at the other responses here, it seems that there isn't a way in Illustrator to do this, am I correct?

I could easily imagine a plug-in or a separate app that generated the outlines and let you paste them into Illustrator, but I haven't found one yet.

The monoline Hershey Fonts have a quite liberal license (correct me if I'm mistaken on this ;-) ), and it really shouldn't be hard to write a Javascript that allows you to input text into a dialog, then draws that string using single line paths only.

Do you want me to take a look at that? Any preference for one of the fonts? The full list is a bit long :-)

Okay, that was fun :-)

Here is a link to the script I wrote for Illustrator CS4 (it might or might not work for any other version): monolinetext.v1.0.zip. It's a Javascript for Illustrator, and you can put it into the regular Illustrator Scripts folder to see it appear in the "Scripts" menu, or somewhere else (and you'd have to browse for it each time).

It shows a little tiny dialog (on which I spend most of the time) where you can enter a size in "points" (relative to the 29 units high Hershey characters) and enter some text. Use Shift+Enter to insert a 'Hard Return', or enter as much text as you want. The text is then drawn out in monoline characters in the center of the screen.

The script is intelligent, in that you can change a previously drawn text by simply selecting it and running the script. Note, however, that stuff like manual scaling and changed attributes (stroke width, color) will be lost. If that's important to you, I might look into it ...

It only supports a small subset of the Hershey Simplex set -- just ASCII, space up to tilde. (And it draws traditional K shapes.)

Understood, certain kinds of devices require stroke fonts. That's life.

Very cool scripting from Theunis!

T

Thank you mr. Phinney!

I wonder if it helped either Matthew "clean" King (the OP) or Gopiballava, since both of them mention they would need something like this for Illustrator ...