union or clip polylines

[bernieke]

What I'm trying to accomplish is prepare some text for vector laser engraving.

I start of by exploding my text into polylines, which gives me a single polyline per letter (or two, in case of an e or o, ...)

But this font has some overlap in the letters.

So I'm looking for a way to get rid of this overlap by joining the overlapping lines into a single line.

I can do this by creating a polyline offset, which gives me two separate polylines, one for the part I want to keep, and one for the overlap, which I can then remove.

But this is a lot of manual work (and adds a little offset I don't really need), so I'm looking for an easier way to accomplish this.

This is what I'm starting with:


This is what I should end up with:


qcad 3.20.1-pro on x64 linux

[Husky]

Hello bernieke - welcome to the QCAD Forum.

Could you please attache the dxf or dwg for this example. Thanks.

[bernieke]

I've edited my original message and attached an example file. It has the text in font Motion Picture as well as the exploded text (polylines) and the by me manually changed version using the offset trick.

[Husky]

Thanks.

Have you tried to use the "Break out Segment" tool?

Husky-2018.06.15-02.png (87.27 KiB) Viewed 2966 times

If your CAM requires an overall joined Polyline you can do that then with "Create from Segments".

[bernieke]

That certainly works much better than the offset method.

But it's still a very manual process. Ideally I should just need to select all the text and have it do its thing in a single operation. (Like the explode does.)

But it's certainly a big improvement already, thanks!