"m" "M' & "W" single letters not engraving/embossing fully if single le

For a single letter engrave/emboss it seems natural to create a more square text box shape... when you do, the lower case "m", and lower and upper case "w W" get their edges chopped off. I was able to fix the problem by elongating the text box (making it wider than it is tall). But eventually someone may get a surprise if it's not fixed...

Hey there,

Could you post some screenshots of this issue to give us a better idea? we'll take a look at it and figure out what's going on

This doesn't sound much different than text strings of some multiple characters being cut off at the ends when the strings are too long. It's a known issue. At present there are no fancy size adjustments being performed on text when it is inserted into the text box. In other words the height of the box determines the height of the font, and if the box is too narrow from side to side even some single character inputs will be truncated on the sides. So elongating the box is the fix at the present time.

It's really incumbent on the designer to set the box size such that a certain number of characters may be displayed. So for example if you know what's the widest character you could for example try the personalization tool on your model using 6 of that character to see if they fit, if you want a buyer to be able to personalize their object with 6 characters no matter what. So this is a good place to ask Shapeways what is the widest font character that is being used? Is it the letter "W"?

Square Text Box and a couple results:


Fixed by making Text Box rectangular:

Thanks, sounds similar alright, lowercase m is the widest.

I think you're right, small letter m is the largest single character that will be displayed. Note that letters can change vertical size when you mix them with others, for example capital letters added to lower case m will make the lower case m get shorter, since the upper case letter is now scaled to the vertical size of the text box. So there may be a way to change the displayed characters by bracketing them with spaces and another character on each side. It may be a way to fool the tool to get different font sizes.

For example you could simply enter <m> for one size

or

<M> <space> <space> <space> <m> <space> <space> <space> <M>

to get a slightly smaller m.

The idea is that the bracketed outside letters don't show up at all, and the bracketing keeps what you want centered. But I can't vouch that doing this won't reveal other bugs in the tool, or that things will remain centered vertically.

edit: I just tried it and it seems to work. You can also use the letter <p> on one end and <t> on the other end to get a smaller m that will also center it vertically in the box. And if you add different numbers of spaces on each side of the bracket you can also slightly shift the displayed letter slightly to the left or to the right.