When you first purchase a font, 99% of the time its for a specific reason. Maybe a project? or a craft design?
Whatever the reason fonts are a great resource, You can make them any size you like, smaller or bigger, depending on what your project requires.
Making a font thinner or thicker is a little more difficult. But if you have a fine cursive font and you need to use it with vinyl, you may need it slightly thicker to cut cleanly. Also, if you have a bold font, you may need to make it thinner depending on your requirements.
Today I will show you how to change the thickness of a font using Silhouette Design Studio and the offset function.
1- Open up your Silhouette design studio. Type the text you would like.
2- I am using Briliants font first up from Fontbundles.net This is a fairly thin design and some parts of certain letters like for example the letter H have really thin areas. This can be a problem when cutting on media like vinyl and card stock.
3- Once you have your text selected. You need to select the offset icon.
It is good to note that once you have used the offset function you cannot change the font. So ensure that your text is correct and any glyphs you want to add have been added before you select offset.
When you are ready select offset. the default is 2mm offset.
4-Adjust the offset on your font so it is small enough to make your text thicker, but also not too thick as to make the text blocky. Once you are happy with the thickness, select apply.
5- It is good to fill the colour so you can check the offset is correct. If it is not, you can use the undo option to go back and adjust your offset.
6- As you can see below, even and 0.9mm offset makes a big difference to the thickness of your text. You can then remove the original text and cut the new thicker text from your media.
7- The offset function also works well with cursive fonts. This font below is Bright Light. It has some very thin parts, so the offset function is great to make the font slightly thicker and ensure that it cuts cleanly.
8- To make a font thinner is a similar method. I am using Ludu Cudu font from Fontbundles.net.
Type your text.
9- Once you have your text, select the offset icon, this time you will need to use the internal offset function. The internal offset will do the opposite of the regular offset function. You can create smaller text inside your original text and make it smaller.
Select the internal offset, then adjust the size till you find it as thin as you would like. Apply.
10- As you can see below where I have filled with red, the text is still the same font but thinner.
This is great for thicker fonts.
11- The other great use for the offset function is to create shadows, so you can layer them for dimension.
The offset function is a great tool in the Silhouette software. You can change a font to fit your needs. Making a thinner font thicker is great for lean cuts and to make a font thinner is great if you would like to either print the text or use a pen in the silhouette machine.
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