Extruded text to STL: signs, names and cake toppers with nine typefaces, bevel, optional base plate and keyring loop. Millimeter measurements.
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Geometry is transferred as STL, without materials. The file stays in this browser for 24 hours.
Latin characters only. The loop and plate overlap the text — your slicer merges them when slicing.
A name, phrase or number — the 3D model regenerates live as you type.
Nine typefaces, letter height in mm, extrusion depth, and an optional plate.
Overlapping solids that any slicer merges automatically when slicing.
With a 0.4 mm nozzle, letters from around 8 mm tall come out legible in most typefaces, and fine strokes want 10 to 12 mm in order not to disappear. The real limit is not the height of the letter but the width of the STROKE: if part of the outline measures less than the width of one extruded line, the slicer simply omits it and the letter comes out broken. That is why a heavy typeface can be printed much smaller than a light one at the same nominal height. The ilove3d 3D text generator includes nine typefaces, and it is worth picking one with even stroke weight for small sizes. If you need lettering smaller than that, the way out is switching to a 0.2 mm nozzle. The preview shows the stroke at real scale, so the problem is visible before printing rather than after looking at a letter that came out broken.
It depends on whether you enable the base plate, and the difference matters. Without a plate, each letter is an independent island sitting directly on the bed: the file is valid and the slicer handles it, but every letter depends on its own adhesion, and the ones with little footprint — an i, an l, a comma — come loose easily. With a base plate everything is joined into a single rigid piece that lifts off whole and can be handled without risk. For a sign, a name, or anything that will hang or stand, the plate is the safe option and it is the default in the ilove3d 3D text generator. Going without a plate makes sense when you want loose letters to glue individually onto some other surface. The plate also stops the letters from shifting as you lift the piece off the bed, which is exactly when signs made of loose letters get ruined.
With a filament pause scheduled by layer, the standard technique, and it needs no multi-material printer. In the slicer you mark the exact height where the base plate ends and the raised lettering begins: the printer stops there, you change the spool by hand, and it carries on. The plate ends up one colour and the text another, with a perfectly defined border because the cut lands on a real layer boundary. Every modern slicer lets you schedule that pause with a click on the layer view. The ilove3d 3D text generator shows the plate thickness and the relief thickness separately so you know where to place it, and it pays to pick both as multiples of your layer height so the cut falls exactly on a boundary. If your slicer supports it, the pause can also be inserted as a colour change marker instead, which survives re-slicing when you adjust other settings later.
Because slicers automatically merge solids that touch when they slice, so performing a boolean union beforehand adds nothing and can break things. A boolean operation on meshes with many coincident vertices — precisely the case of a letter sitting on a plate — is prone to producing degenerate faces, duplicated edges and tiny holes that then cause the print to fail. Leaving the solids overlapping avoids all of that: the slicer resolves the union while computing layers, which is a far simpler and more robust calculation than a geometric boolean. It is standard practice in generators of this kind, and the ilove3d 3D text generator follows it exactly as the QR and star map tools on the site do. If you do need a fused solid for some other program, any mesh repair tool resolves it afterwards on the exported file without risking the original.