Pick a Google Font or upload your own. We bridge every letter so nothing falls out, and email you a stencil, an outline and a centerline version.
Because of the holes. Cut the letter O out of a sheet and the middle falls on the floor. Same for the bowl of a P, both eyes of an 8, the triangle in an A. A stencil font adds bridges — small ties of material that hold every one of those islands to the sheet around it.
Doing it by hand means drawing rectangles over letters in your design software, one at a time, every time you set new text. A stencil font does it before you type.
A bridge has to be a real physical width — wide enough to survive the cut, narrow enough to disappear when you paint. Type, meanwhile, scales freely. A bridge drawn for a half-inch letter becomes a slab across an eight-inch one.
So each file in the set carries a different bridge-to-letter ratio. Pick the file that matches the size you are cutting and the bridge comes out right.
Stencil is the letter as a filled shape with bridges cut through it — what you want when the machine is removing material and paint goes through the gap.
Bridged outline is the edge of the letter itself, with breaks in the path where the bridges go. No curve closes, so nothing is cut out of the sheet. Use it for an outlined look, or to score the edge of a letter, with no fill pass.
Bridged centerline throws away the width entirely and keeps one stroke down the middle of each letter. It is not for cutting out — it is for scoring, engraving and drag-knife work, where a single pass replaces a raster fill.
Yes — all three read fonts installed on your machine, so the one set works as a stencil font for Cricut, Silhouette and your laser alike. In LightBurn set the layer to Line mode whichever file you use; the centerline file is for a single engraved stroke. In Design Space and Silhouette Studio use the stencil or outline file; their cutters follow paths, not raster fills.
Yes. A stencil font only helps inside a program you can type in: LightBurn, Cricut Design Space, Silhouette Studio, Illustrator, Inkscape or similar. If you don’t have one, or you just need one sign, make a text stencil instead: type your words on our canvas and get the finished stencil, no install needed.
One payment per font, shown before you pay. It covers that font for a month, every weight included: come back for another weight, size, bridge style or the extra character sets and download again at no charge.
Anything on Google Fonts, and any .ttf or .otf you own. Script, blackletter and brush faces work too — they get a different bridging strategy, because the rules that suit a Helvetica do not suit a signature.