Lightburn is an amazing program for those that use a laser engraver but it does have it’s limitations. You aren’t going to get all of the options that you get in say Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator for example. Even so, the developers are working on it constantly and more and more features become available with every update.
So with this in mind, when it comes to adding a stroke to text in Lightburn the option is just not available. However, there are multiple other ways to achieve the same effect so let’s take a look at those now.
Watch the video below for the full tutorial or scroll down for written instructions
Method 1 – Stretching the Font
This method will not suit every font but it is a pretty easy way of thickening fonts with very little effort.
All you need to do is click on your text and then you will see a small square on the side of the text. Just click on that and drag from the side to stretch the font.
Obviously, this isn’t going to work for every font since you don’t want distortion to occur but for this one which is pretty squished to begin with this method works nicely.
Method 2: Using the BOLD option
The second method for thickening fonts in Lightburn is to use the BOLD option which you can find at the top menu.
The BOLD option will be greyed out until you click on your text so make sure that you do that first.
This works great but unfortunately it doesn’t work for every font. Not sure why but I found that ARIAL did work which is the font I used in the video.
Method 3: Using the Offset Tool option
This is my preferred option – the Offset Tool is great for adding a stroke around the text and it allows you to choose the size of the stroke.
To do this, select your text and then click on the OFFSET option in the sidebar.
A pop-up will appear that will allow you select the thickness of the offset. Just click on the UP or DOWN arrows to adjust the size.
And make sure you have selected the option to DELETE ORIGNAL OBJECTS.
You can see the very subtle difference between the original and the thicker looking font. Of course, you could make it a lot thicker by just increasing the offset to get the look you are wanting to achieve.
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