If you have ever cut a name out of 4 mm ply you know the moment. The head finishes, you lift the sheet, and the letters go everywhere. M, A, K, E and R, face down on the bench, and no photo of the arrangement you had on screen.
Nothing went wrong. The laser cut what you gave it, and what you gave it was five closed outlines that never touched. The design was five parts.
A word is only one piece if the letters overlap
Letters that merely touch are still two parts after cutting, because the beam takes material with it. If the contact between an M and an A is a single point, the kerf removes that point. The overlap has to be wider than your kerf before the two outlines become one closed shape.
Doing that by hand is the tedious part. You nudge each letter left until it bites into its neighbour, check the bite is bigger than the kerf but small enough that the word still reads, and then do it again when you change the size, the font or the material.
What the setting does
FlexCut3D now has text shapes: type a word, pick a font, and the outline of every letter becomes real geometry that extrudes, takes a thickness and exports as a cut line. The setting that matters is Auto-stick, and it is on by default.
With it on, each letter is slid left until its outline genuinely overlaps the silhouette to its left by the Overlap value in cm. Not the letter box — the actual silhouette, so a diagonal like an A tucks under the arm of an adjacent letter instead of stopping at its bounding box.
Same word, same size. Top: Auto-stick off, five separate pieces. Bottom: Auto-stick on, one.
Numbers from that picture: MAKER at Size 6.0 in Roboto Bold measures 16.8 cm wide with Auto-stick off, and 14.8 cm with it on at Overlap 0.15 cm. Two centimetres of the difference is the four joins.
A space resets the run, so separate words stay separate. That is what you want: a two-word sign should come off the bed as two pieces you can space yourself, not one long ribbon.
When to switch it off
Auto-stick is for letters that have to hold themselves together. Letters cut into something — a name punched through a door sign, a number in a panel — are held by the panel, and overlapping them just runs the holes into each other. Switch Auto-stick off there and set the gaps with Spacing instead.
OPEN cut through the plate, MAKER standing on its own. Different jobs, opposite setting.
Cutting letters as holes brings its own problem, and no software solves it for you: the middle of an O, an A or a P is a separate piece of material and it drops out. Either pick a font with open counters, or keep the centres and glue them back in.
Two more things worth knowing
Size is line height, not cap height. Set Size 6.0 in Roboto Bold and the capitals come out 3.6 cm tall, because the number describes the font's ascent plus descent. Rather than doing that arithmetic, read the width and height in cm printed next to the selected text — they update as you type.
The Text panel. Spacing greys out while Auto-stick is on, because Auto-stick works the gaps out itself.
Line Spacing can go negative. Stack two lines, pull the spacing below zero, and the lines overlap into one piece the same way Auto-stick does horizontally.
The five-minute version
- Create Shapes → Text, and type the word.
- Pick a heavy font with even stems. Judge the thinnest part of a letter, not the whole letter.
- Set Size until the width and height in cm printed next to the selection match the sheet you are cutting. Size is line height, so the capitals come out shorter than the number you typed.
- Leave Auto-stick on and raise Overlap until the joins hold. It has to be wider than your kerf, and a hair of contact is not wider than your kerf.
- Cutting the letters into a panel instead? Switch Auto-stick off and set the gaps with Spacing.
- Check the counters. If the middle of an O or an A is going to fall out, pick an open-countered font or plan to glue them back.
- Export the SVG and cut.
Try it
Create Shapes → Text, in the app. The full walkthrough with pictures is in the guide: How to Use FlexCut3D.