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