I freelance as a graphic designer using Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop & Quark Xpress. But I've been working part-time at a monument shop doing stencil layout on the stones for the last year and a half.
My boss finally purchased an Allen i536 cutter in December (getting that tax credit thing in before the end of the year). He was advised to get the Composer software since it's necessary to cut. I've gotten use to the strangeness of it, but one thing I'm having trouble with is creating polish edge letters. It's easy to create the frosted inlaid letter, just add extra space between the letters before outlining. With polish edge letters though the font has to be either very thin so that the 1/8-3/16" polish edge given the letter looks good or be very heavy so that an inline can be created creating the thin inner letter. So far I haven't found the ideal font (characters and numbers must also look good as well).
So I was wondering if anyone has experience with this or something similar. Right now we're swamped, Memorial Day is a big deadline for us, and the boss doesn't want me to play around any longer with it. This means he'll have me manually punch those stencils.
Thanks,
Daphne