Suggested Fonts

Rick, I have had good results with most any font I have tried the key is to apply a blur to the lettering using GIMP or Photoshop, I use GIMP and usually apply a blur value of 8 - 12 depending on what I am carving. The blur adds contour to the letters giving them somewhat slanted sides, and this contributes to the letters holding up during carving as opposed to standing absolutely straight up. Take any letter and apply the blur value to it, then magnify your view and you will see what I am talking about.

Thanks Bob, I had considered this before cutting the test piece but didn't do so. My results were not good enough, so I thought I'd blur before trying again and possibly cutting shallower so that the bit isn't going as deep into the wood. I'll cut the next one on low speed also rather than norm, I think maybe the bit was moving forward into thin parts of the letters before getting fully up, the blur will help there too.

Started to redo the text and when I got done and over to ipicture I noticed that the lettering wasn't all a consistent black....one font ended up being lighter than the other. I'll have to go back and redo it all and make sure all are the same black fill before putting on the blur.

When cutting letters make sure you do it in slow mode.
What happens is the machine runs up o the letter fast and tries to make those up and down moves and it gets off just a tad but enough on small letters to make a difference.
On large letters you can go wide open and it still looks good.

I don't think I have done one project with recessed letters yet, just a preference that I do all mine with raised letters.

Ok, the fault is mine on the letters. I was selecting/highlighting each letter then blurring them. This left edges on each letter that were white and screwed up the cuts. When I blurred the entire page at once without selecting, it worked well and gave me nice curved letters. This is only a problem if you have large letters and small ones on the same page, a good blur setting on large may be too much on the smalls.

I haven't figured out the gradient thing yet on photoshop, getting some lessons on the program from my daughter-in-law to get better. I have found that using "Harlow Solid Italic" font - from MS Word - with a blur of only 3.0 gives you a great letter - rounded from the bottom all the way to the top just leaving some flat on the top which is good for painting. A blur of 9 - 11 will give you a completely rounded letter - top to bottom.