Font question : Outline to Stroke

[Grafix Smelter]

Having trawled this forum and picked up on a thread that said someone had accidentally done this, how do you do it, deliberately.

Using outline fonts, that is what I get when converting them to editable shapes. They look solid, but by the time I get them into a Gerber editor the outline is all I get.

So my question is : How do I convert an outline font to be single strokes and not an outline "shell" with an infill.

For those curious, this the background to my situation.
I have need to create a photo plotter file, in the form of a Gerber file that uses 'G' codes to plot vector lines.
Converting everything in my Xara file to editable shapes, I can export an SVG file, and drop in into Inkscape that lets me export as an HPGL file, that loads into my CAM editor that lets me export as a Gerber file.

There are so-called non outline fonts mentioned on the web, but they look like the outline is just set to zero which won't work for what I need.

XDPX11 WIN7-64bit

[handrawn]

I'm a bit confused here - if you are using 'outline fonts' they will not become solid shapes of the sort you show, when you convert to editable shapes - because they are outlines only they will convert to shapes in the shape of the outlines - you would have to break shapes to get them solid

do you mean a solid font to which an outline can be applied? - which font are you using ? after converting to editable shapes did you ungroup [twice] to get individual letters?

have you a link to the thread you mention ?

[Grafix Smelter]

I'm a bit confused here - if you are using 'outline fonts' they will not become solid shapes of the sort you show, when you convert to editable shapes - because they are outlines only they will convert to shapes in the shape of the outlines - you would have to break shapes to get them solid

do you mean a solid font to which an outline can be applied? - which font are you using ? after converting to editable shapes did you ungroup [twice] to get individual letters?

have you a link to the thread you mention ?

Thanks for getting back to me.

The font I have used is "Swis721 BT" which I had hoped to convert to what I have read on the web is loosely referred to as an "Engraving" single stroke font.
The thread I found is here :- https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...=text+to+lines

It turns out that the "so-called non outline fonts" I referred to, are actually single stroke fonts, and after further trawling the web I found one called CAMWorks which does the job.
So now I only need do a font replacement and a few tweaks and I'm there!

Thanks again.

[handrawn]

great - thanks for that - hope it now all goes well