Trick to Cutting Thin Fonts on Silhouette (Without Tearing)

It's not uncommon for Silhouette beginners, especially, to have trouble cutting thin fonts on vinyl.

When a font is very thin the Silhouette CAMEO blade passes by the same area twice and can cause the vinyl to pull up or tear while cutting.  But, with just a small tweak in Silhouette Studio you can pretty much cut any font no matter how small, intricate or thin - and even script fonts!

We're answering a reader question on the blog today. Jessica wrote to Silhouette School asking us about an issue with a font being too thin when it was cut.

"(I) attempted my first vinyl cut for a phrase on a tile....bad font choice. The scripty lines were too thin and therefore really didn't cut....Any font recommendations that is semi scripty, but has thicker lines? I wasn't able to bold it or make the words any bigger or they wouldn't fit."

Jessica doesn't actually need a different font and she really doesn't need to make the words bold.  And she's right, trying to enlarge the font by dragging the corner will only make it way too big.  The trick is using the offset tool in Silhouette Studio.

For this example, I'm going to use a thin script font called Rachela from So Fontsy. It's a beautiful font with plenty of glyphs and extras.

After downloading and installing the font and then re-starting Silhouette Studio you'll be able to access it in Silhouette Studio.

Open a new design area and then start by typing out the words using the text tool. Even in rather large font size, the font is very thin in many areas.  If I tried cutting it like this on vinyl or even paper it would likely tear.

If I zoom in a bit you can really see how thin the font is...

Even just slightly thickening the letters will help when it's cut.

Select the text by clicking on it so it's highlighted. From the right sidebar open the Offset tool.

Click "Offset"...but don't click Apply yet.  The default offset distance of .125 is too large. If we used it it would distort the font. Our goal is to make sure the font still looks like the font but that it's just slightly thicker.

You want the offset to be pretty tight around the original text so the detail in the font isn't lost and so the letters don't start blending together.  If you make the offset distance too large, you may lose 'middle' areas of letters like the 'f' and the 'h'.

So we want to reduce the offset distance and type in a smaller offset. The offset distance you ultimately decide on will depend on the original size of the text and the font style itself but usually and offset distance of .01 or .015 works well.

Here's how my text looked after the offset distance we reduced to .01.  If you look closely, you can see there is a slight outline around the original text...that's the offset I just created.

The next step is to pull the offset away from the original line of text.  In the image below the offset is on the top and the original is below.

You can now delete the original line of text.

It should be pretty easy to see now how cutting the slightly offset text would be quite a bit easier especially for Silhouette CAMEO beginners.  Now that you know how to cut every font in your Silhouette font library - go get all the fonts!!


So Fontsy's Big Font bundle is a great place to at $25.99 and with 26 fonts that's just $1 a font and they're all commercial use!  Hurry though the Big Font Bundle is only available until 1/25/19.

Note: This post may contain affiliate links. By clicking on them and purchasing products through my links, I receive a small commission. That's what helps fund Silhouette School so I can keep buying new Silhouette-related products to show you how to get the most out of your machine! 

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