Study: Best Small Font for 3D Printing
I just published this entry where I compare many of the fonts suggested in this forum and others. All the best fonts I found were actually available with the open font license so that's an unexpected bonus. In the end I created a tier list and swatches for each font:
https://www.prusaprinters.org/prints/71231-font-swatches-tested-ranked
See my entry for much more detail. This analysis was for a default 0.4 mm nozzle. Ofc you can print even smaller at 0.25 mm.
RE: Reply
Nice analysis! My favorite in your pool of tested fonts is also Overpass. I'll keep that font in mind for future designs. Thanks for publishing your results for others to see! 🙂
Have you tried some of the more "boring" pre-installed fonts common to most OSes like Arial, etc.?
RE: 90s Fonts
@fortinmike Most of the "boring" fonts you may think of (Ariel, Verdana, Impact) were designed for 1990s LCD displays and not 3d printing. Also I actually don't have any of those fonts by default on Linux. I could add those to my tests but I really doubt they would perform better. The only one I included (and is worth mentioning) is the controversial Comic Sans since it was designed to mimic inking done by comic artists and therefore has a uniform linewidth.
The other non-free fonts I included (Futura, OCR, DIN) are considered world-class print fonts that many people may already have.
+1 for Overpass. Thanks for attacking the issue systematically. I'm curious what is the lowest point size you can use with Overpass and a 0.4mm nozzle, and remain readable?
smallest possible
@towlerg I didn't print it, but without messing with "detect thin walls" it looks OKAY in the slicer scaled down to 93% of the size in the article.
I'm a little confused, my CAD package (and every other that deals with text) uses point size. Sorry to be a pain.
confused?
@towelerg in the section called Minimum Print Size & Scale, the first column is pt - meaning point size. So Osifont at 24 pt or Overpass at 16 pt are your best bets. Based on my comment above the absolute smallest you might be able to get away with for Overpass is 15.25 pt.
RE: Study: Best Small Font for 3D Printing
Thanks for your work - just used it for some text inserts. Overpass in 6 mm worked great.
RE: Study: Best Small Font for 3D Printing
Glad I could help.
RE: Study: Best Small Font for 3D Printing
Cool! Thanks for the Top 5 swatches.
I do a lot of 1st-layer text... maybe I'll try some of those. My all time favorite font is Helvetica .
¡no entiendo Español!
Nein! Nicht Versteh!
Я немного говорю по-руÑÑки но не очень хорошо, и...
I'm not very good at English either! Maybe someday I'll find a language I'm good at?
RE: Study: Best Small Font for 3D Printing
Thank you (@teque5) for doing this research. I tried out the Overpass font in bold with 16 points in Solidworks and it worked great. It gave me clear and crisp numbers that were 5.2mm tall and two print lines wide. I used PETG with 0.2 layer height and a 0.4mm nozzle.
I was also able to make my lettering flush by turning off "merge result" when extruding the lettering in Solidworks. This allowed PrusaSlicer to split the lettering into separate parts. Which allowed me to select a different color / filament with my MMU.
