Text is the hardest thing to put on a biscuit, because the parts that make letters legible are exactly the parts that are too thin to print.
Pick the font for the stroke, not the look
A 0.4 mm nozzle lays a line about 0.8 mm wide at minimum. Anything thinner than that either does not print or prints as a broken dashed line.
At 90 mm wide, a typical script font has hairline strokes of about 0.4 to 0.6 mm. That is below the limit, so the thin parts of every letter disappear and the words become disconnected blobs.
The tool measures this for you. It finds the narrowest stroke in your actual text, at your actual size, and tells you the number in millimetres plus the size that would fix it. Trust that number over how it looks on screen.
Fonts that work at 75 to 100 mm: heavy sans faces, slab serifs, and rounded display faces. Anton, Bebas Neue, Lilita One, Titan One, Baloo, Fredoka.
Fonts that need 130 mm or more: anything called script, anything with a visible thick to thin contrast. Great Vibes, Allura, Parisienne, Sacramento.
Mixing fonts across lines
The most common thing people want is a small heavy line over a large script line: HAPPY in a condensed sans, Anniversary in a script underneath.
Set the fonts as a comma separated list, one per line, and the scales the same way. So two lines with anton, greatvibes and scales 0.55, 1.5 gives a small Anton line above a large Great Vibes line.
The scale is what makes it work. A script at the same size as a heavy sans looks wrong, and its hairlines are thinner, so it needs to be bigger for both reasons.
Lines are stacked by their ink
Lines are packed by the actual extent of the letters, not by the font's declared line height. Font metrics include space for accents and descenders that your text may not use, so stacking by metrics leaves visible gaps between lines, especially when mixing a script with a sans.
If your lines feel too tight or too loose, change the line gap. It is measured in ems of the taller line.
Text needs an outline shape
This is not obvious. If you set the outline to follow the design, every letter becomes its own separate outline, so you get one small cutter per letter rather than one plaque.
For text, pick one of the other outline shapes:
- Offset grows the text outward and then back in, which bridges the gaps between letters and gives a blob that hugs the words. Good for a cutter.
- Rounded, rectangle, ellipse or circle give a plaque around the text. Good for a stamp.
The Text stamp and Text cutter presets set this correctly.
Reading the right way round
Pressing a stamp flips it, so the tool is mirrored and the impression is not. The 3D view shows the part you print, which reads backwards. The flat preview shows the cookie, which reads correctly. Both are labelled.
If you turn mirroring off, the biscuit comes out backwards.
Practical advice for the dough
- Chill both the dough and the stamp. A cold stamp releases cleanly, a warm one drags.
- Flour the face of the stamp, tap the excess off.
- Press firmly and evenly, straight down, and lift straight up. Rocking blurs the edges.
- Press before baking, not after.