BROTHER CANVASWORKSPACE

Version tested: 2.6.1

Operating system tested: PC

Tested: 05 December 2024 / Missy Meyer

Cost: Free

Where to get it: https://canvasworkspace.brother.com/en

Font file types to use: TTF/OTF, single stroke

Image file types to use: SVG

How to See & Use the Fonts

NOTE: There have been some issues with Brother CanvasWorkspace when it comes to these fonts in the past. I cannot guarantee that this guide will work for all line fonts, and I cannot guarantee that all of my line fonts will work in this program. ~MM

I was today years old when I realized that Brother stylizes “CanvasWorkspace” as all one word. I’m going to refer to it as “BCW” from here on out, because the full name is a mouthful.

First, make sure that the font is installed on your computer or device. Check the “Install fonts on [operating system]” links for more information. For this guide, I’ll be using Spicy Sketcher.

Create a new project, then click on the letter T on the left-side menu (green arrow) to start up the text tool.  I also recommend zooming in a bit (red arrow), because mine started me out at a 40% zoom, and everything was way too tiny on my artboard.

Here you can see that it’s starting me off with the Antique Oakland font, one of the BCW fonts.  You can scroll down past those fonts to get to the fonts installed on your own computer.  The BCW fonts will all  appear first in alphabetical order, then you’ll get to your own fonts in a separate list, also in alphabetical order.

Here in the letter S area, I’ve found Spicy Sketcher 1, which is the single stroke version of the font. I also have Spicy Sketcher 2 (the double stroke version) installed, but BCW doesn’t even see it!  It’s totally weird, because most other programs prefer the double stroke version.

With your font selected, click on your artboard and type out your text. It’s going to look REALLY weird at first, with extra lines in some places, and lines missing in other places.

When you’re done typing, click elsewhere on your artboard, and you’ll pop out of typing mode. The text will now be surrounded by this blue bounding box.  You can see that the missing parts (the crossbar of the A, the middle stroke of the E) have now appeared where they should, but there are still a bunch of extra lines in there.

What’s happening is that the single stroke versions of these fonts are created with open contours, meaning that the start and end points don’t meet up like they do in regular outline fonts. This confuses most programs, including BCW, so the program connects the start point and the end point with a straight line.  This is something we can fix!

First, though, let’s make things a little easier to see. You can increase the weight of the stroke (green arrow) to make the text a little bolder. I’ve changed the project from Cut to Draw (red arrow), but you can save that step for later if you prefer.

Now we’re going to separate the letters and turn them into vector shapes, so we can edit away those extra straight lines that BCW added.  Be warned, once we do this step, the text will no longer be typeable.

Right-click anywhere inside the bounding box containing the text, and select Convert to Shapes.

The text is now in vector shapes, but it’s all grouped together as one object. You’d think that you could right-click again and select “ungroup,” but nope, that isn’t a clickable option. So we need to work around it.

Go to your Edit panel from the right-side menu (red arrow). In there, scroll down to the Process Overlap area, and select Divide, the second icon from the left in Shapes (green arrow). This will divide all of the strokes up into separate shapes.

Now, you can see that each stroke is its own separate object.  Be aware here that some letters are made up of more than one stroke; for example, that middle stroke in the E is its own shape, now separated from the rest of the letter.

Click on a letter once, and it gets the blue bounding box around it. Click on it a second time, and it goes into “node mode,” where you can edit the points and curves.

Now we can get rid of those extra straight lines connecting the start point and the end point of each stroke. Click on one of the nodes at either end of the extra straight line (red arrow), so that the line itself is highlighted in light blue. Once that line is lit up, click on the “open outline” button in the top menu (green arrow).

Boom! That extra stroke is now removed, and the outline is open again.  The “open outline” button at the top is now highlighted in light blue, indicating that the shape is not fully closed, which is exactly what we want.

Some strokes are going to be tough to open up, just because it may not be readily obvious which stroke is the one to remove. For example, that small stroke in the middle of the E.  I’ve duplicated it so you can see the two different ways it will light up: the top one shows that the straight line is highlighted in light blue, and the bottom one shows that the curved part is highlighted in light blue.  They look pretty darned similar.

It may help to look for the handles (the additional blue dots that show the direction a curved stroke is curving in). On the bottom one, the two handles are also lit blue, which indicates that this one is the curved stroke that you want to keep.

Here you can see that I’ve cleaned all of the letters up, and removed all of those extra lines.  Now the text is ready to be resized, rearranged, rotated, and otherwise adjusted!

Once you’ve made those changes, your design is ready to save as a CWPRJ file, export as a FCM file, or transfer as an FCM file to your ScanNCut machine!

EASIER MODE!!!

If you’d like to save yourself the hassle of removing all of those extra strokes, you can create your design in a separate vector graphics program (Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape, etc.), save it as an SVG file, and then import it to BCW.

Once you have a design created in another program and saved as an SVG file, open up BCW and go to File > Import from Your Computer in the top bar menu.

Select your SVG file from wherever you have it saved, then click the Open button.

The design gets placed on your artboard, and you can resize it, rearrange it, and do additional tweaks at will, then send it to your machine.

Because your vector design program probably used the double stroke version of the font (in this case, Spicy Sketcher 2), your pen or stylus will go over each stroke twice: from start point to end point, then back along the same path to the start point again. So it’s up to you to decide whether you want true single strokes with more work removing those extra lines, or if a double stroke is acceptable and you can do a lot less fiddly editing.

How to Access Alternates, Ligatures, and Extended Character Sets

Some fonts will have extras, such as multi-letter ligatures or alternate characters. The example font, Spicy Sketcher, has both of those.

I’ve typed out the word BOGGLE with the intention of replacing the two regular letters G with the double-letter ligature GG.  But surprise, BCW has automatically replaced the ordinary Gs with the ligature!  You can see that they’re a little different from each other, especially where the crossbar in the middle sits.

I’ve poked around, but I’m not seeing a way to turn off that automatic ligature replacement.  (Maybe another reason to use an alternate vector design program!) I wanted to use that ligature in this instance, but I can see where some folks might not want to use it. In that case, I recommend adding a space between the two Gs, so that it gives you two of the same original G, and then narrowing that space back up later in the editing stage.

You’ll need to use a secondary program to access alternates.  Here’s Windows Character Map, where I’m copying an alternate to the E.  Windows Character Map also likes to connect the start and end points of the letter with a straight line, then it fills the whole thing in, so everything looks blocky and weird in there.

Select the letter you want to replace with an alternate, then use the Ctrl+V shortcut to paste the alternate in place of the original letter.

Then, as shown up in the first section, right-click, select Convert to Shapes. Then go to your Edit panel, scroll down to Process Overlap, and select the Divide option under Shapes.

Open up all of the outlines to remove those extra straight strokes, and the letters can now be edited, adjusted, rotated, resized, and placed however you like.  Then you can send the design to your machine.

How to Use SVG or Other Alphabet Sets

This is another far easier method than having to remove all of those extra strokes, but not every font comes with a single file that contains all of the characters of the font.  Spicy Sketcher does!

In a new document, go up to File > Import from Your Computer in the top bar menu.

This will pop open a window where you can navigate to where the font files are hanging out.  Select the SVG file containing the alphabet of the font, then click the Open button.

This will bring in the entire character set of the font. Be aware that this is a lot of elements for BCW to deal with at one time, so things may be a little bit sluggish.

Select the characters you’d like to use, then move them over to the side.  I like to arrange them roughly in order, but I’ll save the more detailed arranging until I can size them up a bit larger.

Once you have all of the letters you want to use, drag your cursor to create a bounding box around all of the unused letters, then delete them from the artboard.  This should clear up any sluggishness, and things will become quick and snappy again.

Here I’ve arranged the letters, but I’ve discovered something strange: part of the E at the end has disappeared.

Well, technically it’s still there; it’s just hidden.

When you bring the SVG file in, BCW will automatically apply a fill to the letters, and it fills in that area between the start and end points.  This isn’t something that you need to meticulously edit away, though!

I’ve turned the fill color yellow so that you can see it better.  That fill on the L is overlapping on top of the E, because the L is higher up in the layer stack than the E. We didn’t see it before because BCW automatically fills with white, which is tough to see on its white background.

Easy fix: just turn off the fill color!  With the text selected in a bounding box, you can either go to the Fill option in the top menu (green arrow), or go to the Properties menu from the right side menu, and use the Fill option there (red arrows).

Whichever of the two you select, you’ll get this same color picker box pop-up.  Click on the very top left option, with the gray and white checkerboard grid. This indicates transparency.

With that fill color turned off, everything is showing as it should, and the design can now be saved or sent to your machine!

If this program has been updated since this test and this guide no longer works, please drop me a line at the contact form so I can update this page!