Text sign

A nameplate, door sign or keychain, with the plate measured around your words.

A sign is four things stacked, and the one you cannot work out by hand is the first: how wide is your word? That comes from the font, so the plate is measured around the text from the real glyph outlines rather than guessed from the letter count. Type a longer name and the plate grows with it.

The font is a printing decision, not only a look. A light face loses its stems at a 0.4 mm nozzle, so Sans Bold survives small text where the default will not. Stencil is the odd one out: its letters carry no enclosed centres at all, so an "o" has no island to bridge and nothing that can fall out of a thin sign. Condensed answers the opposite problem: when a long name will not fit a narrow tag it narrows the letters rather than making you shrink them, so the text keeps its height and its stems.

The outline is what makes the letters printable. It grows each letter's shape outward by the width you set — thin type becomes a bold sign, and once the outline is wide enough for neighbouring letters to touch, the whole word fuses into one piece. That matters most for Outline only, which drops the rectangle and leaves just the letters: they hold together where their outlines overlap, so if the word comes apart on the plate, widen the outline (about a tenth of the text size is a good start) or switch back to a plate.

A counter that closes is meant to close. Push the outline past the hole in an "o" or an "e" and it fills in, because at that width there is genuinely no counter left. Reduce the outline or raise the text size to open it back up.

The outline sits in its own layer. It stands proud of the plate, and the letters stand proud of it — so in your slicer you can insert a colour change at the height where each begins and print a two- or three-tone sign on a single-material printer. Set the outline rise to 0 if you want the letters straight on the plate instead.

Two colours make a two-filament sign. Leave the letter and backing colours matching and the sign is one solid, exactly as above. Set them differently and it becomes two bodies — the letters, and the backing they sit in — which is what a multi-material printer needs: export 3MF and each colour arrives as its own part, ready to assign to a filament or an AMS slot. The letters are cut out of the backing rather than sitting on top of it, so nothing gets printed twice, and they still sink into their seat so the sign prints as one piece. On a single-material printer the colours are just a viewport aid; the slicer colour change above is still the way to print it two-tone.

The keyring lug hangs off the left end and is sized around the hole, so a bigger ring always keeps a wall around it. It is offered for the plate backing only: on a bare silhouette there is nothing to guarantee the lug lands on ink rather than in a gap between letters.

1. Open the Generate panel from the left sidebar and choose Text sign (under Signs & art).
2. Type the words. The plate resizes around them as you type — you never set its width.
3. Pick a font. Heavier faces keep their stems at small sizes, and Stencil letters have no floating centres — nothing to bridge, nothing that can drop out.
4. Pick the backing: Plate for a rounded rectangle behind the text, or Outline only for just the outlined letters.
5. Set the outline width, then how far the outline and the letters stand up.
6. Optional: give the letters a different colour from the backing for a two-filament sign.
7. Turn on Keyring lug for a tag you can hang (plate backing only).
8. Generate: the sign drops in as one editable body — two, if you picked two colours.