Engraving FONTS

All about Engraving fonts
One line engraving fonts
Single line engraving fonts
Stroke fonts

NEW Orach Technic Pro
True Type Engraving font and Single line font
Three style with 5.770 characters, 1600 language

Engraving PORTAL

InfoFORM, in addition to maintaining complete engraving production systems, places special emphasis on engraving fonts — a segment that has not kept pace with advancements in this field over the past decade.

Engraving fonts should be a precise and defining element of any quality engraving studio — a reflection of its technological capabilities.

We believe that addressing font-related challenges could significantly boost the development of engraving machines, laser systems, and engraving software alike.

Important about engraving fonts

The director of a well-established typographic house once wrote in an article about the culture of writing:

“The best indicator of a typographic house is its font. The best insight into the quality of a printing firm comes from looking at its font archive. A person’s choice of font is also a good reflection of their cultural awareness. A literate person writes legibly — an illiterate person leaves only a thumbprint.”

Based on that statement, we can easily draw a similar conclusion for engraving houses:

If Friedrich Deckel’s engraving house had high-quality fonts, it surely had high-quality engraving machines as well.

Engraving fonts should be a point of pride for every engraving studio — a clear reflection of its technological level and design philosophy.

Perhaps due to the enormous energy spent on advancing hardware and software over the past decade, font development has been largely neglected, as if it were someone else's responsibility.

And maybe it should be someone else’s task — for example, an international association of engraving and laser system users. Imagine the graphic design world without standard fonts like TrueType or Type 1 — it simply wouldn't function.

On this page, we aim to identify and analyze common shortcomings in engraving fonts, and offer several possible solutions.

We are convinced that solving the issues surrounding font development would significantly enhance the engraving industry as a whole — from hardware and laser systems to the software that powers them.

Lack of standardized engraving fonts-format

In the engraving industry — which exists primarily because of engraved letters — font formats still lack standardization.

Each manufacturer of engraving machines, laser systems, or engraving software uses its own proprietary font format. As a result, fonts are not interchangeable or compatible across different systems.

Many engravers and users who encounter these issues in practice become discouraged and eventually leave the industry, choosing not to invest in newer or more expensive models.

International buyers, when they don't see support for their native alphabets or characters in the machines being offered, often lose interest entirely and walk away from the purchase.

Engravers need a new engraving font format .eff

An unpredictable long time will be needed for manufacturers to agree on and develop new software supporting a new standardized engraving font format, such as .eff. Therefore, we suggest an alternative solution to this problem.

We propose creating a new standardized, simple .txt file format for each individual character. A collection of these .txt files, stored together in one folder along with an information file and a kerning table, would constitute an archival, standardized engraving font.

Each manufacturer could develop a small compiler that converts these archival fonts into their own proprietary font formats. This would allow every user of a given machine to purchase the compiler as an optional software module.

By compiling existing fonts from the archival format, manufacturers with extensive font libraries could offer their fonts to the entire engraving community — not just to buyers of their machines, as is common today.

This solution would not require any changes to existing engraving software, making it the simplest and most easily adoptable approach.

Lack of engraving fonts-editors

The term “good graphic” refers to engraving fonts that fully comply with the standards of quality engraving fonts, with deviations only allowed for tool radius constraints.

We have had the opportunity to review engraving software packages offering thousands of fonts — and naturally, these do not include the finest font samples from the seven largest typographic houses.

High-quality graphic fonts from the “Magnificent Seven” and more than 50 other typographic houses form the foundation of written communication in the graphic design world, and their formats are far more advanced than those commonly used in engraving.

The term “good technical” describes engraving fonts that feature minimal overlaps and carefully directed modifications only where necessary, coupled with good optimization.

Traditional engraving houses, which historically manufactured mechanical machines and sets of engraving models, hold an advantage due to their extensive experience in font compilation — a fact that is clearly reflected in the quality of the fonts they offer.

The greatest deficiency in engraving fonts today is found in the laser engraving sector, despite the advanced technology employed there. For beginners, these fonts can be described as technically sound but graphically basic.

It is true that laser systems with galvanometer heads can engrave at “light speed,” producing over 1,000 characters per second. However, they would perform even bette using high-quality graphic-technical engraving fonts.

The phrase, “Our programs can use TrueType and Type 1 fonts,” has become a common way for new machine manufacturers to shift the focus from font quality to technological features.

Every engraving house may not need to develop its own fonts, but it must respect and properly maintain font standards.

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This text was written over 20 years ago, and since then, no significant progress has been made in standardizing engraving fonts, nor is there active work on this front. To overcome this situation, we leveraged our many years of experience developing single-line technical fonts and created the Orach Technic Pro family in .ttf format, which addresses all the aforementioned issues.

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1L Engraving fonts, Engraving font editor, Orach engraving font,
Font for engraving, One line engraving fonts, Single line engraving fonts

A design or text engraved on a material.
Engraving is proces carving of letters or design into materials.

Engraving methods: 3D engraving, CNC engraving, Laser engraving, Cylindrical Engraving, Deep Engraving, Diamond engraving, Dot pen engraving, Drag Engraving, Hend engraving, Ring Engraving, Roll engraving, Rotary Engraving, Rotogravure.

Engraving product: Awards, Badges, Door Signs, Gun, Gifts, Jewelry, Key Tags, Knife, Medals, Memorial plaques, Mold, Name Plates, Pens, Pet & ID Tags, Picture, Plaques, Ring, Sculptures, Signs, Stamps, Technical Plates, Tools, Trophy Plates..

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