Woodwork/IT advice

[Arnold9801]

I’ve been hand carving wooden signs for years on a hobby basis and used to make use of “Microsoft word”and my works photocopier to print my sign on paper and then transfer it onto the wood to be carved by using carbon paper.

Microsoft word would give the appropriate text/font and then I would use the photocopiers magnifying feature to obtain the required size on the text for the sign.

I’ve recently retired and subsequently don’t have access to a photocopier. I’m doing a lot more signs now, but am having to draw then free hand. They look just as good as the ones I would print, but it takes a lot longer!

Does anyone know of a programme/app I could access that would provide me with these two features combined re numerous texts/fonts and in particular the magnifying feature?

Word does have an enlargement but the max sizes are still to small to help me making signs.

Regards

 

[topchippyles]

Do you have a printer

 

[Garno]

Try this, its free to use,

https://www.smartdraw.com/sign/sign-making-software.htm

 

[Woody2Shoes]

Hi - what I do is use 'Gimp' on Windows - https://www.gimp.org/about/introduction.html

It's free, well written, and has good features for scaling text and/or graphics to arbitrary sizes, although it's a little daunting at first.

I use it to print images across multiple A4 sheets and then use sticky tape to join the sheets together - I prefer to stick the paper directly to the timber with spray adhesive or Pritt stick (saves the fiddly step of using carbon paper).

Cheers, W2S

 

[Garno]

Sorry that one is not free but I think this one is
https://www.designer.io/

 

[AndyT]

If you are using a Windows PC, you will almost certainly have a copy of Wordpad available - just type Wordpad in the search bar. It's not as powerful as Word, but you don't need chapters, footnotes and all the other complexities of documents, you just want a line of text that you can alter.

Type in your text and select it. Then use the font settings on the toolbar. The font box will give you a dropdown showing all the fonts you have installed on your PC. (If you need more, it's easy to download them.) There's a box for the size, with popular sizes on a dropdown from 8 to 72 "points". (There are approx 12 points to an inch.)

In Wordpad, and in Word for that matter, if you want a different size, just type a different number in the box - there's no restriction. You should be able to get a suitable size to stick down and cut into directly.

There are lots more subtleties, some of which will depend on your printer's settings, but you must know that already.

If you want to arrange the text on a curve, that's a different question, but this might be all you need.

 

[Arnold9801]

Many Thanks for your replies. I will look at these suggestions.

Regards

Arnold

 

[thetyreman]

check out inkscape and GIMP both free and opensource

 

[Gerry]

I don't know if you realise that you can type the font size in to the drop down box rather than selecting it.
In Office 2013 the number must be no more than 1638 points

Gerry