3D Text

3D Text turns typed characters into real solids: watertight, printable, and made of the same geometry as anything else you model. Counters — the enclosed spaces in letters like o, a, and B — come out as genuine through-holes, not painted-on shapes.

The gesture

1. Open Draw ▸ 3D Text…, or search “text” in the command palette.

2. Type your text. Line breaks work; each line sits below the last.

3. Pick a font (see Choosing a font below).

4. Set Height — the type size, the same measurement a word processor calls font size — and Extrusion depth, how far the letters stand off the surface. Both are in your document’s units.

   Individual letters come out shorter than the Height you type, because a font distributes that measurement across ascenders, descenders, and the space around them. A capital O at 150 mm Height stands about 108 mm tall in Onest, and a different font will land somewhere else. If you need a letter to be an exact size, place it and measure it, then scale.

5. Click OK, then click where you want it. The text places on whatever face you click, or on the ground plane.

The result is a single component instance named after the text, so 3D Text "OPEN" shows up in the Outliner under that name. One Esc cancels before placement; one undo removes it after.

Choosing a font

The font list has up to three sections:

Bundled — the families that ship with Hew, available everywhere including the browser. They were screened to extrude cleanly.

System — the fonts installed on your machine. On the desktop apps this list appears on its own. In a browser it needs your permission first: click Use my system fonts… and accept the prompt. Some browsers don’t offer this at all, in which case the section doesn’t appear and you can load a font file by hand instead.

Loaded — any .ttf or .otf you’ve opened yourself this session. Loaded fonts last until you reload; the document stores the resulting geometry, never the font, so a file you send someone else opens fine without it.

Type in the filter box to narrow the list by family or style name. Families with more than one face get a style selector — Hew uses the real Bold or Italic face from the font, and never fakes one by slanting or thickening a Regular.

When a font warns you

Some fonts — particularly variable fonts, whose stored default outline is what Hew reads — have glyphs whose outlines overlap themselves. Hew tells you when the text you’ve typed uses one, because self-overlapping outlines are exactly the case it can’t classify reliably, and letters may come out with the wrong parts filled.

It’s a warning, not a refusal. Place it and look: plenty of such fonts extrude fine anyway. If a letter comes out wrong, pick another face.

Booleans with text

Text arrives as a component instance, and booleans need plain solids. So when you select 3D Text for Subtract, Union, or Intersect, Hew explodes it to solids first and tells you it did — that’s the “Component exploded to solids for the boolean” message.

This is what makes engraving and embossing work: subtract text from a face to engrave it, union it to emboss. The explode is a real edit, so undoing back past a boolean of this kind takes a few steps rather than one.

Printing considerations

Extruded text is watertight from the start, so it exports to STL without repair. Two things worth knowing:

• Very small text at very fine detail can produce slivers thinner than your printer can resolve. Raise the height rather than the depth if letters come out fragile.
• Engraved text (subtracted) leaves the letter shapes as voids; embossed text (unioned) leaves them standing proud. Both stay watertight.