How to Master Text In Silhouette Studio

I don’t know about you but one of my favorite uses for my Silhouette machine is creating and cutting text. After all, with text you can say all the things you want to say and you can make personalized gifts for everyone!

This is probably one of the most common uses of Silhouette machines so we’re going to show you how to get started! It won’t take long until you can master text in Silhouette Studio!

How to Master Text In Silhouette Studio

Choosing Your Font

Let’s begin by choosing your font. Did you know that with Silhouette Studio you can use any of the fonts you have on your computer? That gives you tons of options and lots of fun possibilities for creating the look you want.

Editing Text

To make any edits on your text, you need to have your text highlighted in Text Editing mode. If you’re not currently in Text Editing mode, double-click your text. This will allow you to make changes such as font, color, bold, italic, and underline (the last three are only available for some fonts).

Welding

When working with cursive (script) letters, remember that you will need to weld the letters in a word together. You see, each of the letters in a word (before welding) are treated as a separate object. They will have cut lines around each one of them. What you want is a word with the letters joined together and the cut lines around the entire word.

To do this, type your word into Silhouette Studio using your chosen font. Right click on it and in the menu, choose “Weld”. The cut lines around each letter will disappear and one will form around the word as a whole. Weld is mostly used for script fonts – when you need them to be overlapping – but sometimes you might want to use it with other fonts as well for a particular effect.

One thing to remember – once you weld, you can’t make any edits to your word. It kind of takes your text of the individual letters and turns it into an image of the whole world.

Character and Line Spacing

Before you weld though, you need to think about character and line spacing. Sometimes after welding, the letters in a word will overlap too much and looked squished together. Or they might be too far apart so that they aren’t overlapping at all and won’t weld properly at all.

Character and line spacing need to be taken care of before welding. That sounds a little tricky doesn’t it? Don’t worry. You’ll soon get the knack of being able to tell which ones need adjusting and which ones don’t. For character spacing, you can either use the slider to change it or type in the exact amount of spacing you want.

Line spacing is the same idea only with the spacing between lines of text. Most people find that making each word separately eliminates this issue. By putting each word into its own text box, you’ll be able to make changes to them easily and independently.

Grouping/Ungrouping

Even after welding, you may find that a random letter here and there is still separated from the rest of the word. This can be solved by grouping your text. Drag your mouse over the whole word to select every letter. Right click this and then choose “Group”. This will allow you to move the entire word now as one piece.

Using the Offset Feature

For a really simple and fun effect, you can outline your text. This is done with the Offset feature. This is one function that you can and should do after welding in order to get the proper results.

Offset creates an expanded line around a letter or object. If you use to it create internal lines instead, it will provide a contoured effect.

There you go! You’re all set to get started creating all kinds of text with your Silhouette machine. What will you make?

Once you master the basics, you can learn how to curve text in Silhouette Studio here.