INKSCAPE

Version tested: 1.4

Operating system tested: PC

Tested: 29 November 2024 / Nadine Spires & Missy Meyer

Cost: Free

Where to get it: https://inkscape.org/

Font file types to use: TTF/OTF, double stroke; TTF/OTF single stroke (requires additional work)

Image file types to use: SVG, EPS

How to See & Use the Fonts

First, make sure that the font is installed on your computer or device. Check the “Install fonts on [operating system]” guides for more information.

In this guide, the Spicy Sketcher font will be used for the text examples.

After installing Inkscape on your system, start up the program. A new document will automatically load. Select the “Text Tool” by clicking the “A” icon on the left-side toolbar.

To add your text, click once on the work area and begin typing out your text. Inkscape uses a font called Sans as the default font, but you can change this to any font of your choice.

The Font Family list can be found in the top-left toolbar. The text needs to be highlighted in order to change the font. Double-click to enter text “Edit Mode”, and then click + drag your cursor to highlight the text.

Go to the Font Family drop down menu and choose your double stroke font. You can also search for a font by tying the name in the search bar. In this case, we’re choosing Spicy Sketcher 2.

When you change to a double stroke font, the text will seem to disappear completely. It’s there; the bounding box is showing around it. You just can’t quite see it yet.

You’ll need to apply a stroke in order for the font to be visible. If you don’t already have your Fill and Stroke panel available on the right side of the screen, you can go to Object > Fill and Stroke in the top menu.

Once you’re in the Fill and Stroke panel, select the Stroke Paint tab, and then click on the solid color box. This will give you a solid color on all of the lines of the font. Odds are it will default to black.

Now that you have your text, you may want to arrange, resize, tilt, or otherwise manipulate the letters in your design. You can do that, but it will make the text untypeable, so make sure you have all of the letters you want on your artboard before you start. (If you’d like to add alternate letters, multi-letter ligatures, or other extras from the font, see the next section.)

First, select the text bounding box. Then go to Path > Object to Path in the top menu in order to convert the letters into vector shapes.

With all of the text still selected, go back up and this time go to Path > Break Apart.  This will separate all of the strokes into separate objects.

Now you can select each letter individually. But be aware, some letters are made up of more than one stroke! As an example, you can see here that the lowercase g is made up of four separate strokes.  You’ll want to either select all of them in your layers panel (as shown), or drag your cursor in a box around that letter in order to capture all of its parts.

If you resize several of the letters, you’ll see that they will retain their original stroke weight. Letters that you make larger will now appear to have a heavier stroke, and letters that you’ve made smaller will now have a lighter stroke. (There is a way to avoid this! See the last section below about SVG alphabet sets.)

If this happens, no worries; you can even everything out with the Fill and Stroke menu. Go to the Stroke Style tab, and you can then choose the same stroke width for every line. Here they’ve all been set to 3mm.

Since you’ve expanded these letters to vector shapes, you can now save your design to SVG, and upload it into other programs.

If you haven’t yet done that Path > Object to Path step, you’ll want to do it now. Why?

If you don’t do this, plotter programs such as Silhouette Studio and Cricut Design Space will not be able to see the file.

In fact, Cricut Design Space will complain that it could not save your uploaded file. Silhouette Studio will load the file, but all you will see is a blank space.

ADVANCED: You can use the true single stroke version of a font (in the case of our example, the Spicy Sketcher 1 font) if you want to put in a bit of work! Inkscape, like most programs, doesn’t like the open contours of a single stroke font, and closes the contours with a straight line connecting the start and end points. Here’s Missy’s YouTube video showing how to remove that extra line and get to the true single stroke letters!

How to Access Alternates, Ligatures, and Extended Character Sets

The newest versions of Inkscape will automatically insert multi-letter ligatures in place of regular characters, if the font contains the proper code for it.  In this example, BOGGLE was typed out in Spicy Sketcher 2, and the two individual uppercase G characters were replaced with the double-G ligature, so that it looks more hand-written.

If you’d prefer to turn that feature off, you can do it in the Text and Font menu. If you don’t already have that panel on the right side, click on Text > Text and Font in the top bar menu.  If you already have it on the right, enter the Text and Font menu.

With the ligature highlighted, on the Text and Font menu open up the Ligatures drop-down, and unselect the checkbox next to Common. Once it’s unchecked, click the Apply button at the very bottom right.

Inkscape will likely not only turn off the ligatures, but it will revert those letters back to its default Sans font. (Whyyyyy, Inkscape?)  With those letters highlighted, you can reselect your font in the Font tab of the Text and Font panel. After choosing the font, be sure to click the Apply button in the bottom right.

As for adding in other ligatures, alternates, or other special characters, Inkscape has a Unicode Characters panel built into the software for easy access to all of the extras included with the font. Double click your font to enter text “Edit Mode” and highlight the letters you want to replace. Go to Text > Unicode Characters to open the panel.

The panel will open on the right-side of the screen and should take you straight to the font that you are using. Change the Script and Range to All to view all of the characters.

The Unicode Characters panel in Inkscape suffers from a few glitches.

Your font may not be selected automatically; the search bar isn’t easy to find; and once selected, characters are tiny and almost invisible – thin gray strokes on a dark gray background. Bottom line, the Unicode Characters panel in Inkscape is a nice newer addition to the program, but it isn’t very easy to work with, especially with double stroke fonts.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can change the Range to Private Use Area to find the extras that are coded into a font. Here you can see a teeny tiny alternate E. With the character selected so that the box it’s in turns blue, you can click the Append button in the very bottom right corner to place it into your text.

(Be warned; Inkscape will probably change your entire text back to its default Sans font as soon as you click on Append. Once again, you’ll need to select the text and change the font back.)

It’s much easier to copy and paste the alternates, ligatures, or additional characters through a secondary program such as Windows Character Map (PC), Font Book (Mac), or your preferred font management program. You can find guides to some of these programs in the “Software Guides” section of this site.

Here you can see in Windows Character Map, that same alternate E was selected from the Private Use Characters section. It was copied from Character Map into Inkscape in place of the original E.

At this point, if you’re happy with how your text looks, convert it to curves using Path > Object to Path. Remember, if you don’t do this, most programs won’t be able to see the file correctly.

Now you’re ready to export as an SVG file and use it in your preferred plotter program. Click on File > Save As.

In the new window, give your file a name and choose where to save it to. The “Save as Type” field should already have “Inkscape SVG” chosen, but if it doesn’t, choose that from the drop-down menu. Click “Save”.

How to Use SVG or Other Alphabet Sets

Some fonts may contain vector files with the true single stroke format of the font’s character set. Easy to use, the SVG file takes the fuss out of removing the closed lines as shown in the YouTube video above. The most recent ZIP for the example font, Spicy Sketcher, includes this type of file. Here’s how to use it.

Go to File > Open and click on the “Spicy Sketcher Alphabet SVG” file.

The file will open in a new document. Select everything and move this to the side of the work area. You can choose to remove the fill under the Fill and Stroke panel. To quickly select multiple letters, hold Shift + click on the individual letters.

Click + drag your selection over to the work area. At the top of the toolbar, check that the button to scale the stroke width in proportion is turned off. This will stop the width from increasing when the letters are resized, an unpleasant thing which was shown above.

You can now quickly resize, rotate and position each letter in eye catching ways. Delete the remaining unused letters.

Save your project as an SVG file and upload it to your plotter program.

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!