About the Imported Text

Text Import Wizard imports text as a series of b-splines which are derived from the curve data specified in the font files. Alibre Design natively supports these b-spline curves. This means that the font outlines are very accurate, and because they are not described mathematically as large sets of stright lines, they require less memory and processing power to draw and manipulate.

Alibre Design does not see the text as text, but rather as a bunch of curves -- the precise mathematical curves that the font designers used used to describe the font in the first place. This can present a problem from time to time when you work with fonts that were not designed to be extruded. For example, some fonts (script fonts especially) have overlapping lines and characters, which Alibre Design cannot extrude or cut. Some fonts are just designed very sloppily, and even they they don't appear to have any problems, they actually do. You can often fix problem curves by zooming in and editing them by hand, but this task can be a tedius task.

Though some fancy fonts can be imported and extruded with no problems at all, you may need to experiment a bit to find the fonts that produce the best results for you and the characters you're attempting to import.

There also appears to be a bug in Alibre Design that causes an FF_MERGE FAILURE error when attempting to extrude or cut some complex b-spline curves, but only when the sketch the curves are on lies on exactly the same plane as the surface you're trying to extrude from or cut into. There is a simple solution for this if you encounter this error: