Text cutout

Hello,

What will be the best way of put some text cutout in the print? Like the letters in a spray stencil plate.

I thought I could simply do linear extrusion of 2D text shapes from a DFX file, and carve that out from the print body using a difference operation in OpenSCAD.

Well, that probably is one of the ways to do it, but I am having a problem creating a DFX file which OpenSCAD can read. The only program I currently have to create a DFX file is MS Visio, but OpenSCAD does not like the format.

Are there any free/open source tool which either generates DFX out of text (preferably support both TrueType and Unicode and more!) or convert common graphics file, like black & white GIF or TIFF into DFX out there?

Or, is there actually a different/better way to do this?

i do this with sketchup.
put a rectangle on the ground
put your 3D text on,
select all and click the intersect? all (don't know the english name as i use a dutch version)
if you now remove the text it just leaves the holes there.

done.

Try these threads:

Image to 3D
Software for extruding 2d image into 3d model?
openscad dxf import

They all discuss various ways to handle DXF files in OpenSCAD.

I have special needs (different language fonts, mix of graphics and text) so what works best for me is:

Create 2d graphics in inkscape
Convert everything to paths
Insert nodes (to smooth out the paths)
Flatten beziers
Save as dxf

Then I can import into OpenSCAD and extrude.

This is similar to the method mentioned in one of the links above, but I found I needed to insert nodes to get good results with some of the Indic fonts I use. Some of the instructions I read for Inkscape didn't mention that some of the tools only operate on the current path node editing tool selection.

Also note that inserting too many nodes can cause OpenSCAD to run out of memory.