On 8/21/07, Bibi Morris <bibimorris@...856...> wrote:

Yes I understand what you are saying, however I am not seeing that happening in 45.1.

When you tried it, and got what I wanted, did you have to do a break apart to preserve the centers of the letters?

Nope.

I think I understand what's going on. The culprit is the font you use. See, when a path contains an inner subpath, that subpath makes a hole only when the direction of that subpath is contrary to that of the outer path. Otherwise, if their directions are the same, there's no hole - the path is solid. That's why, if you convert an O to a path and break apart, you get two paths, and when you combine them back, you get the hole back. If you break apart, Path > Reverse the inner path and combine, you won't get a hole.

Now, in your font, for some weird reason, the direction of path in "o" is opposite to that of "d" and "g". Therefore when you convert "dog" to path, the places where the letters overlap become holes. And Union of a path with itself only removes the non-hole overlaps as extraneous; it does not touch holes because it assumes they are there for a reason. Therefore, you could not remove those holes in letter overlaps neither by offset nor union.

One way to fix this would be, after converting to path, select both inner and outer parts of "o", Path > Reverse them, then combine everything back and Union. Or just use a different font :)

It would also help, btw, to not work always in Outline mode - in normal mode it's much easier to see if some overlap is a hole or not (because you have fill). You could also note in regular mode that you have an atrociously huge stroke width (73px!) on your shapes which I assume isn't really necessary for a cutter :)