CorelDraw X4 Review Part 2 – Engraving Fonts

Before we go into talking about Corel’s engraving fonts we first need to know what we consider to be an engraving font. Tome an engraving font is not a font that “looks” like a so called engraving font but is one that more resembles a font that we typically use in a rotary engraving machine. You could make the argument that Windows fonts for the laser are engraving fonts but when I think of engraving fonts than I will think of those for a rotary machine. This is what Corel was attempting to give us.

Engraving Fonts

To try and address our industry needs Corel decided to place 10 engraving fonts within the CorelDraw X4 Graphics Suite that was supposed to be designed for our industry. I was quite intrigued with this addition to the CorelDraw arsenal and was excited that I was going to be able to use some of these so called “stick fonts” that were typically only available to rotary engraving programs. What is a “stick” font you might ask? A “stick” font is a font that is made up of lines as opposed to outlines and bitmap fills.  Figure 1 shows us a couple of “stick” fonts that are available within my rotary engraving software.  The top line is a 3 line Helvetica while the bottom line is a single line Helvetica. They are both the same fonts except that one font has 3 lines while the other has 1 line. If we use the same size cutter on each one of the fonts we will have a “thicker” font with the 3 line than we will have with the 1 line. Stick font output to our rotary machine is not the only type of font that we can use it is the best.

Figure 1

When it comes to the laser machine we can also use these so called “stick fonts”. If we send one of these “stick” fonts to the laser machine than the font will engrave in a vector format. This type of output allows us to create very fine line text because it has no raster fill. These fine lines fonts look nice on plaques but more importantly for me is that when I am doing very small text where lasering quality of our letters suffer because of when I raster engrave these fonts do not engrave well than the vector format will look better. Figure 2 shows a font lasered from my rotary engraving software on my laser. You can see that the font is very thin. It has to be because it is so small. I have placed a dime in the picture so that you can get a feeling for the scale of the text height. I could use a raster font but the engraving would not be as good as it is so small. It is for this reason that when I have very small engraving I will consider using vector fonts as opposed to raster fonts. It may take a bit more time but because the font is so small that a couple of extra second’s means that it is of less consideration than if the font was big.

Figure 2

The above example is as good example as I can come up with for why we should use vector fonts on our laser machines. Now why would engraving fonts be good for a rotary engraver? I can think of one reason very quickly. That is adding text to logos that we created in CorelDraw. For years I like a look of other people have had to generate logos for my old rotary machines in CorelDraw. Creating the logos in CorelDraw and getting them into my rotary engraving software was easy. However if  needed to use an engraving font with the logo than it meant bringing the logo into my engraving software placing in the font which was not always easy and then re exporting the logo and text to a new logo file. The idea of being able to add an engraving font to the logo right in CorelDraw sounded like a very easy way to speed up this process.

Secondly, one of the things that we can do with a number of the new rotary engravers is they are able to engrave directly from CorelDraw directly to the engraver. This means that we do not have to go through our engraving software. This is appealing to a lot of those people that are more conversant in CorelDraw than their engraving software.

So lets us take a look at the fonts and see how they stack up to our needs.

Loading the fonts into Windows

When you install Corel X4 you are presented with figure 3. To install the software you need to select the “install CorelDraw graphic suite X4” see figure 3. When you want to install the engraving fonts select the “Install Extras” as per the blue box in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Figure 4 shows the window of the install extra screen. Expand the font directory and select the “Fonts” folder and then the “Engraving Fonts” as per the red box in Figure 4.

Figure 4

The problem with this installation is that the fonts will not install. I tried this install a couple of times to no avail. Note: At the time of this writing Corel knows about this problem but has not verified a solution.

Okay we cannot install the fonts the way that CorelDraw says so how about if we use Font Navigator? Again I tried this and it did not install all the fonts. It failed to install two fonts. The only way I could install the fonts was to use Windows standard font install procedure that is found in the “Fonts” directory located in the control panel.  To install a font in Windows requires that I go to the “FONTS” folder in Windows. I need to select the “Control Panel” (I am using Windows Vista) selection as per Figure 5.

Figure 5

This will open up a window with a number of icons listed in it. Double click on the “FONTS” icon to open up the “FONTS” folder. Figure 6 shows us the “FONTS” icon as it is listed in the “CONTROL PANEL” folder.

Figure 6

Once the “FONTS” icon has been clicked on you will be presented with another folder. This folder lists all the fonts that are installed on your computer system. Figure 7 shows my font folder which lists all my fonts.

Figure 7

When you want to install a font into your Windows system under Windows Vista you need to right click in an empty part of the folder. You will have a pull down menu come up as per figure 7. Select the “Install New Font” on the pull down menu. Note: Under Windows XP the font install option is located in the “FILE” pull down menu.

Once you have selected the “Install New Font” option you will be presented with a new “Add Fonts” window as per figure 8. This is the window where we install any fonts that we want into Windows. The first thing that you have to do is to select the location where the fonts are located. In this case I have loaded all my Corel fonts into my “E” drive. So I need to select my “Drives” as “E Drive” as per figure 8 (red box). This is telling Windows to look on the E drive. The “Folders” listing (blue box) indicates that I have drilled down to the “TRUETYPE” folder. If you want you could load in your CorelDraw DVD and locate the “Fonts” directory. On the CorelDraw DVD you will find the engraving fonts in CORELDRAW GRAPHICS SUITE | EXTRAS | FONTS | TRUETYPE – ENGRAVING. When you select the “Fonts” folder Windows will list all the fonts that are located in that folder. The “List of Fonts” (green box) lists all the fonts that are in that directory. You will notice that all the engraving fonts start with G and are either a “1L” or a “4L”.

To install all the fonts click on the “Select All” button and then click on the “Install” button.

Figure 8

Once you have clicked on the “install” button the fonts that you have selected will be installed into Windows and be accessible to CorelDraw or any other program.  Installing fonts this way is not the most efficient way of installing fonts and most of the time I use will always use font navigator. I have had to use this method as for some reason the fonts will not install properly any other way. I have made CorelDraw aware of this problem and hopefully we will see a fix. Figure 9 shows the fonts installed in the Windows directory.

Figure 9

Once you have clicked on the “install” button the fonts that you have selected will be installed into Windows and be accessible to CorelDraw or any other program.  Installing fonts this way is not the most efficient way of installing fonts and most of the time I use will always use font navigator. I have had to use this method as for some reason the fonts will not install properly any other way. I have made CorelDraw aware of this problem and hopefully we will see a fix. Figure 9 shows the fonts installed in the Windows directory.

Figure 10

Now that we have installed our engraving fonts we can go back to CorelDraw and start using them. Note: I tend to like to shut CorelDraw down when I am installing fonts. On some systems and versions keeping the program open has caused issues. Figure 10 shows a screen shot of our font pull down menu in CorelDraw. You can see that the fonts that I installed are now available to use within the program. I installed 10 fonts and figure 10 shows that they all are now available. Selecting a font is the same as any other font. Select your engraving font and start typing as you would for any other font.

Figure 11

If you want to see exactly the way the font is going to look in a rotary engraving program than go to VIEW | WIREFRAME and you will view the font in vectors only. This is the way your rotary engraver will process the font. Note: if you want to send the font as a vector to your laser than you need to select the font and give the font a hairline outline. Figure 12 shows a partial screen shot of an engraving font in wireframe mode.

Figure 12

Personally I was excited when I heard that Corel was including engraving fonts with their latest release.  For years I and a lot of others have struggled with using CorelDraw for both rotary machines and some laser applications. For example my rotary engraving machine will take output directly from CorelDraw and send it to the laser machine. However how can I run an engraving job that uses outline fonts such as the outline font that is in figure 13?

Figure 13

Outline fonts are fine for laser machine because you can place a fill inside the white area. However for rotary engraving machines where we use tools these fonts are not ideal unless we are able to generate a fill routine to fill in the white areas. Although CorelDraw does have a tool called the “Contour” command that will fill our letters it is far from proper to do plastic engraving with as per figure 14.

Figure 14

Proper engraving fonts like those that are pictured in figure 1 are the bastion of any rotary engraving job. Fonts like this need to be made with precision and for a rotary machine.

Figure 15 shows all the fonts laser engraved on a piece of laser brass

Figure 15

When it comes to the laser machine so called stroke fonts are not as important. However figure 2 showed us a job that required small text. This job would not look as good or may not even be able to completed unless I used a single stoke stick font like the font on line 2 of figure 1. Note: the font size for the font in figure 2 is .05 inches in height.

The problem with the engraving fonts in CorelDraw is that although they call them engraving fonts they are not like a number of the traditional fonts that we use in the rotary engraving applications. These fonts to me are more decorator type fonts. The engraving fonts in Corel are more ideal for jobs that require you to use so called “fine” fonts. I like using fine fonts when I am working with higher end awards or when I am working with really small fonts that require condensing such as when I am making small engraving plates for trophies or resins. Most importantly though is that the engraving fonts are still outline fonts and not single line fonts as per the font in figure 1.

Well I spent this month’s entire article on the new engraving fonts that CorelDraw has included in X4. I know that a lot of people will be intrigued with using these fonts so I felt that it was important to review these fonts. The problem as we have seen is that there is a flaw in the install program and the fonts do not seem to install properly on my system. Note: I had 4 other people that had the same problem. All of us were running Windows Vista. I do not think that Vista is a problem but you never know. As I mentioned earlier I have made Corel aware of this problem but I have had no resolution as to a solution. Mind you if it is an install problem than this will not be corrected.