I was just wondering. Does anybody know if the words made with Embird Font Engine sew out as neat as those made with the Embird Alphabets. Don't know what to purchase with some Christmas money.

Meganne has given a brilliant answer and as she does a lot of digitising she should know. Sorry I have no answers as I only work in PE design

All the text designs and alphabets I have supplied via Designs by Cuties, have been created with Font Engine.

Having Font Engine also allows you to auto digitise any WMF picture files into designs. Of course I don't recommend these (Auto Digitised) designs to share/sell with/to others as they are usually many layers thick, but some can turn out quite good enough for your own use and they certainly are fun to create.

Embird alphabets are great because they are already digitised and are completely scalable from very tiny to very large (read about them at URL below) and are foolproof. Although, of course, you are limited to the fonts styles available, whereas with Font Engine you are only limited by the number of True Type fonts you can download to your computer. There are thousand of TT Fonts available for free to download, some good, some not so good, you can also use DingBats to create designs from with Font Engine.

Some TT Fonts are great to digitise, some turn out disastrous so you still need to manually punch these other (disastrous) fonts if you are determined you want a particular font for a text design.

I can highly recommend both Font Engine and Embird Alphabets, but you can create more and have more fun with Font Engine, then later you can be really selective and buy a couple of Alphabets for specific purposes such as very tiny or very large monograms.

I hope this helps. Merry Christmas, Meganne

3 comments

by suet 18 Dec 2010

Thank you Meganne for taking time to answer me. Because font engine's designs can be a bit hit and miss I think I'll stick to manual digitizing Dingbats and the odd letter. I have had a good play with the trial alphabets and they come out neat everytime. I just thought maybe It was me having a few disasters with the trial Font Engine.

by mops 18 Dec 2010

If the outline comes up less than satisfactory you can reduce the number of nodes and so create a straighter lines and nicer curves in your letters. And when you do whole names you can change the start and end points of the letters so to avoid jumps. I love the way you can get the letters exactly like you want them. And once you get the hang of it, it can be done in a jiffy.

by suet 18 Dec 2010

Thanks, Mops for your advice. We are snowed in here in the UK so I will have time to play with the settings and see if I can get any better results.

I love Font Engine. It's so easy to use and gives great results. I don't have bought alphabets so I can't compare.

Yes and no Sue. Depends on how involved the font type is. for the highly ornate ones, Embird sometimes gets "confused". For the standard font, such as curlz or boyz r gross (those tend to be common ones used with embroidery), Embird is wonderful! I have several of the alphabets I bought and truthfully, I use font engine 95% of the time.