Best font to print small letters ?  

RE: Best font to print small letters ?

I would recommend a 0.25mm nozzle for small text. In terms of font types - the silcer will truncate all details such as serifs at some point, so you might only get the general font architecture such as letter widths. If you want a font that is close to WYSIWYG, then try Helvetica rounded or V.A.G. rounded.

RE: Best font to print small letters ?

I'm partial to Arial rounded for any text I do. just do some design iterations to make sure you end up with an even number of extrusion widths and no gap fill and it should turn out pretty well. Anything that does little "spots" or areas is not ideal. Play with font size and weight to get a feel for it.

It also depends how you want the text to appear - are you actually printing the letters themselves, or are you making the letters a negative space? The latter gives you a bit more leeway with shapes since you're a little less limited by the nozzle diameter; you can "not print" smaller features than you can print - think about a o.1mm wide straight line - you can't actually print that with a 0.4mm nozzle. But you *can* print a 0.1mm slot on something with sufficient dimensional accuracy - if your extrusion width is 0.4, you'd do an 0.4 mm line, move over 0.5mm and print another 0.4mm line. 

BTW, if you're one of those people that likes to put text on the underside of your prints with a URL, full life story, etc... please reconsider. 

RE: Best font to print small letters ?

BTW, if you're one of those people that likes to put text on the underside of your prints with a URL, full life story, etc... please reconsider. 

... Hm, apparently I never finished that thought and it makes me look like an ass. Anyway, where I was going with that is you see a large number of prints on thingiverse where the creator has badged the bottom this way. While I recognize why they do it, it often drives me bananas because it adds  to the print time with all the travel, small retractions and whatnot for poorly chosen fonts , and significantly increases the failure risk for first layers. 

I'm sure there's a happy medium somewhere that lets folks tag their parts less obtrusively but I have yet to see it in common practice. 

RE: Best font to print small letters ?

Thanks guys for the advices. I tried arial rounded it worked pretty well !

I created some calibration parts, it wanted to note parameters directly on the part. 

I actually looked into this.

@mt-burn I did a comparison between a lot of fonts for 3D printing and wrote up my results in this prusaprinters entry. You can do better than ariel.

why?

Great stuff. Overpass looks nice.

Why?

A dumb question which I'm sure you answered but what font size is used for the swatches?

swatch size

If you scroll down a bit I have a section where I talk about size. There is a lookup table for each font to have a 0.6 mm linewidth, which is about the smallest you can go with a 0.4 mm nozzle. I put an absolute table in there if you are using blender, but otherwise programs use all kinds of measures for font heights (pt, mm). Maybe I'll add some clarification.

update

@towlerg I updated the table to have absolute (mm, pt) for each font.

"

@Teque5, very nice article! Thanks for sharing !

I had no idea that such a large point size would be necessary (because I hadn't tried). When printing indented text would your preference be text on top surface or touching bed?

up or ddown

@towlerg If you are printing negative (plastic around text) I have found that face down on the bed is better since you get better edge fidelity and the surface is more flat, but face up is okay if you do some post-processing with an x-acto. Check out the 4th image of my swatches - that text is all printed down toward the heated bed.

Thanks