Text in a 3D world

Ever since mechanical design tools went 3D, one task seems to have stumped the software designers.  The melding of 2D graphics into a 3D design just doesn’t seem to work as smoothly as it should.  At least that’s been my experience with ProEngineer and SolidWorks.  Mechanical designs often include graphical overlays/labels and silkscreening.  Free-hand graphics are very difficult to deal with because they have to be regenerated in a vector format.  Some tools allow a bitmap image to be imported and then the designer has to trace it to approximate the design using standard lines, arcs, splines, etc.

Most design tools have done a decent job when it comes to text.  They allow text to be placed on surfaces which can then be extruded as protrusions or cuts into a part.  In order to recreate a company logo, it is often necessary to use a specific font, but the CAD packages usually have a limited number of fonts available.  Identifying a font can be a challenge sometimes.  This was the case just recently so I turned to a useful online tool: Identifont.com

Identifont, in the spirit of the game ’20 Questions’, allows you to answer several questions about the characteristics of a text sample in order to narrow down the possible font matches (listed to the left of the page).  Give it a try and see if you can determine the font used in the image below.