Stick Font (What's New in SOLIDWORKS 2014)

SOLIDWORKS 2014 includes a new font called stick font or single line font. Stick fonts are different from traditional fonts on your PC because they contain characters created from strokes made from single lines that terminate at the end of each stroke.

Traditional fonts have characters made from complete closed loops, so all characters are actually complex bubbles. This means strokes are formed by doubling up line segements to form enclosed spaces. The reason is so your operating system can fill the interior of the bubble, allowing for creation of many types of solid shapes. See Wingdings for example.

Although useful for word processing, traditional fonts are not useful for translation into objects that can drive machining processes, such as laser engraving, water jet and CNC maching. When traditional fonts are used for tooling paths, they force the tool to make two passes for each stroke of the character. This is wasteful and time consuming. Worse, it can cause bad results because of the double-pass.

Example of a traditional font:

SOLIDWORKS 2014’s stick font is meant to address this issue by removing the need for tooling path double-passes when machining text.

The new stick font is named OLF Simple Sans OC, created by OneLineFont.com. This font is designed to be used with the Sketch Text command to create text made up of stick letters. (Other stick fonts may be available from OneLineFont.com.)

Example of a stick font:

To use this new font:

Start a sketch in any part or assembly.
Within that sketch, launch the Sketch Text command.
Click in the graphics area to place the Sketch Text.
Type the content of your Sketch Text in the entry field.
Unselect (clear) the Use document font setting, then click Font button.
In the Choose Font dialog, find OLF SimpleSansOC and select. Note that the font appears geometrically odd in the preview. This is due to how the operation system interprets the font. It does not represent how the font will appear in SOLIDWORKS 2014 modelling environment.
Select OK.
Select the green check mark to accept and close the Sketch Text command.