June 17th, 2008 | 
Author: I learned this little trick while trying to help someone extrude some text on a curvy surface. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of you knew of a different way to achieve the same results. That’s one of the things I like about SolidWorks: there’s so many different ways to go! I must confess it used to drive me nuts in the beginning, when I was constantly wondering if I was doing it right. I mean, it looked right, but was it really right? While I can’t exactly say that there is a right or wrong way to do things in SolidWorks, it is true that some can be faster or more efficient than others, or may work better for your particular design intent. So, if you know a better way to do this, by all means, do share!
So, we were trying to extrude text on a curvy surface, a round (fillet) to be more precise. Using wrap was out the question, given the kind of surface, so we thought about extruding the text from a tangent plane, up to the fillet surface, like in this image.
It looked OK, but if you notice, the thickness of the text isn’t uniform. It becomes more obvious in a side view of the model; notice how the extruded text follows the shape of the plane on one side and the shape of the fillet surface on the other. The size and depth of the text and the radius of the fillet can also make the uneven thickness more obvious.
So, after thinking about it for a while, we tried something different. First, we created a new surface, an offset of the fillet surface, by applying Offset Surface from the Surfaces Toolbar. Face 1 in the image is the face of the fillet and the 0.02 in, in this case, is the offset distance.
The text was sketched on a different plane, an offset from the first plane, and located behind the fillet surface. The text was then extruded from the sketch plane up to the offset surface previously created.
The result was text with an even thickness that follows the shape of the fillet surface.
So, how would you do it? Please, share!
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You can do it in one easy step by using just Extrude. Change the “From” dropdown (at the very top) to “Surface/Face/Plane”, and select the face you want to extrude from. Note this only works if your text all fits inside one face, if it spans multiple, I suggest doing the method you mentioned above. I dropped a screenshot at: http://forum.solidworks.com/forum/attachments/Skinningacat.png
Thanks, Charles! I’ll try that one. I tried something somewhat similar, but the text was too big and it didn’t work out. Maybe this way will work better.
Update: Charles, I tried it that way in mine and the extrude didn’t come out right. Do you think the kind of font may affect the results? The preview looked good, but the final result was missing the center holes of the letters.
Indeed, that is a downfall of extruding text, it can happen regardless of what method you use to extrude. Even doing a blind extrude on a flat block will sometimes do that.
I have found, when all else fails, you can right click on the text and do “dissolve sketch text”. This will convert the text to lines, and then will always extrude. Note that once you convert to lines, you can never go back.
Hey gabi, very nice! This is exactly how I would do it for the reason you found with the extruded text.
Thanks, Josh!
Here was how I did it recently. I had a bottle with curvature in both directions, so I couldn’t wrap, but the text needed to wrap or else it would get distorted. So I first made a surface with only curvature in one direction that approximated the actual surface (revolved straight line). This was made as a separate body inside the bottle body. Then I used Wrap to get the text onto the single curvature body, and made it stand out from the face of the bottle. Then I offset the face of the bottle (offset surface) and cut off the extra text. Then I merged the text body with the bottle body.
This is a convoluted workaround, but it works when you need wrapped text on a face you can’t wrap to.
Hey Matt,
Thanks for the comment! This is really good stuff! Perhaps, in the future, SW should somehow create a tool that allows for a wrap on faces like the one in the example, or the bottle you were working on, that make extruding text something extremely tricky.
Thanks again!