LIGHTBURN

Version tested: 1.7.04

Operating system tested: Mac

Date tested: 7 January 2025 / Nikita Grimes (Kitaleigh LLC)

Cost: $99.99 USD for Core License Key or $199 USD for Pro License Key. This is a one-time payment for a 1 year of updates. $30 each additional year of updates.

Where to get it: https://lightburnsoftware.com/pages/which-version-do-i-need

Free trial: Yes, 30 days

Font file types to use: TTF/OTF, double stroke (and TTF/OTF single stroke with additional effort)

Image file types to use: SVG, PDF, AI, DXF

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.

Open up a new project in Lightburn.

Use the text tool to type in your words or phrases. It’s fine if they appear in your default font; we’ll change that in a moment.

Select your typed text and click the dropdown text selection box at the top of the window. From here you will select a double stroke font or a single line font. I am using ‘Spicy Sketcher 1’ and ‘Spicy Sketcher 2’.

In LightBurn you may see part of the letter’s lines are missing. This is due to the ‘welded’ option being toggled on. You can see this in ‘Spicy Sketcher 1’.

In order to see these lines, toggle the ‘welded’ option off.

From here you can send ‘Spicy Sketcher 2’, the double stroke font, to your laser to score without further edits needed. With this font the laser head will move over each stroke of the letter twice.

If you would like to have a single pass on your fonts, you can use the single stroke option with edits. First, you will want to select the text and Edit>Convert to Path.

Then select one of the path shapes and click the Edit Nodes tool.

Select the part of the path you want to delete and press ‘D’ on your keyboard. This will delete that section of the path.

Why are these extra lines showing up in the first place? Because these are true single-line paths, LightBurn tries to close the path by connecting the start point and the end point with a straight line. (Most programs do this with paths that are not fully closed.)

Continue this process until all the extra connecting lines are deleted.

Be aware that some of these extra straight lines might be hard to spot; for example, the left vertical stroke of that lowercase M has an additional straight line in it. On that lowercase A, the round bowl at the bottom has a straight vertical stroke added in on its right side.

Now the single stroke version Spicy Sketcher 1 is ready to be sent to your laser. With this edited version, the laser head will move over each stroke of the letter just one time.

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.

LightBurn does not offer a way to manually access ligatures or alternate characters within the software, but it does include automatic ligature replacement. However, there is no option to disable this feature. If you prefer not to use automatic ligatures, I recommend adding a space between the characters while typing and adjusting the spacing after converting the font to paths.

To work around not being able to manually access alternate characters, ligatures, or other extras, you can copy and paste them in from a secondary program. Here, I copied the alternate characters from Font Book and pasted them using the keyboard commands (Cmd+C to copy, Cmd+V to paste) into the program. LightBurn doesn’t allow you to paste directly over an existing character; instead, you’ll need to delete the original character before or after pasting the new one.

Then you can do further edits or send it as-is to your machine.

How to Use SVG or Other Alphabet Sets

Some fonts will come with an SVG file that contains the full character set of the font, in case you prefer it! Our example font, Spicy Sketcher, now comes with one of those.

There are two different ways you can bring in an alphabet SVG. The first way is to go to File>Import from the top menu bar, locate the file, and click open.

The other, which is my preferred method, is to drag and drop the image file in.

Using this type of file, each stroke remains independent. For example, you can see that the leg of the ‘R’ can be selected separately from the rest of the letter.

For this reason, I recommend selecting all parts of each letter and grouping their paths before moving them. To do this, simply select all parts of the letter, right-click, and choose ‘Group’.

Next, you can move, resize, duplicate, and arrange the letters as desired and delete the rest. To make it easier to arrange the letters, use ‘align’ and ‘distribute’ in the top tool bar.

It is now ready for you to save or send 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!