Text → pegboard

Text → pegboard turns words into pegboard panels: your name over the workbench, TOOLS above the tools, a label for every drawer. Letters can be inlaid in a second colour or raised from the surface. Boards are sliced, joined and mounted like the infinite pegboard. Included from Maker.

Text

Your textDefault MAKER

Up to 500 characters on up to 20 lines. Press Enter for a new line. Characters the font doesn’t have are left out or replaced by a close equivalent, and the app tells you which.

FontDefault Archivo Black

A library of open-licensed fonts (SIL OFL), from heavy sans and condensed faces to rounded, script, stencil, slab, mono and pixel styles. Bold, wide letters make the strongest boards.

Letter sizeDefault 150 mmRecommended ≥ 120 mm with the capsule systemRange 5–1000 mm

The font’s em size; a capital letter is about 70 % of it. Letters need to be large enough to hold holes: with the capsule system, 120 mm and up gives every letter a few slots. Below 80 mm the app checks for strokes thinner than 0.8 mm and warns you.

Letter spacingDefault 0.02 emRange −0.5–2 em

Extra space between letters, as a fraction of the size. Tighten it to join letters into one board; open it up for airy lettering.

Line heightDefault 1.1Range 0.5–3

Distance between lines as a multiple of the size.

AlignmentDefault Centre

Left, centre or right, for multi-line text.

Panel shape

OutlineDefault Contour

Contour — the panel follows the letters, grown by the margin: organic, sign-like shapes. Blocky — every letter gets a squared block (its box grown by the margin), and the blocks are merged and rounded into one panel: a bold, poster-like look. The blocks follow the letters, not the hole grid, so holes are laid out on the panel like on any board.

PanelsDefault Per word

Per word — one board per word, hung with a gap between words. Per line — one board per line. All in one — one board for the whole text. Grouping decides where the gaps are; long boards are still sliced to your bed as usual. Panels that would overlap are joined automatically.

MarginDefault 12 mmRange 2–200 mm

Distance from the letters to the panel edge. It also merges separate parts, such as the dot of an i, into one piece. Raise it if a letter falls apart into islands. With raised letters and Automatic anchor placement, the app may widen it so that every piece has room for a wall anchor (see Raised letters).

Corner radiusDefault 8 mmRange 0–200 mm

Rounds the corners of the panel outline.

Letters

Text colourDefault Charcoal

Colour of the letters.

Board colourDefault Warm white

Colour of the panel around the letters (the base colour).

Letter styleDefault Inlay

Inlay sets the letters flush into the front face as colour layers — the cleanest result, with colour changes only in the first layers of a face-down print. Raised makes the letters stand out from the surface by the relief height, for a tactile sign look (see below).

Relief heightDefault 1 mmRange 0.2–10 mm

Only for raised letters. 0.8–1.5 mm reads well from across a room.

Holes under the lettersDefault On

On lets the holes run through the letters too, so the whole sign works as a pegboard. With raised letters, a hole keeps the edge margin from the letter edges, so it goes wholly through a letter piece, a letter centre or the panel: only strokes wide enough for a slot plus the edge margin on both sides carry holes (with the default 4 mm margin on the capsule system, about 13 mm across a vertical stroke and 23 mm across a horizontal one). Off keeps the letters solid, so they read best, but only the panel around them carries holes: small text may end up with very few.

Raised letters

Panels print front face down, so letters standing proud of the front can’t be part of them. A raised sign is made of three kinds of piece instead:

• Panels (A1, A2…) in the board colour, with letter-shaped openings that go all the way through them. Each opening is the letter grown by the joint clearance (0.15 mm by default), so the letter slides in.
• Letter pieces in the text colour: the letters of each panel print as one piece, labelled like the panel plus -L (A1-L belongs to A1). They are as thick as the panel plus the relief height: glued in flush with the back of the panel, they stand out from the front by the relief height.
• Letter centres in the board colour, labelled like their panel plus -C, as thick as the panel. They fill the areas a letter encloses — the middle of an O, A, B or R, the loops of a script font — which would otherwise be loose islands in the panel. A bit of panel that a letter cuts off at a seam, and that the neighbouring piece can’t take over, becomes a -C piece too.

Panels, letter pieces and centres all print flat with their visible face on the bed. Openings that go right through print cleanly, with no thin floor under the letters and no long bridges above the bed. The issue list tells you how many letter pieces and centres your sign has.

Seams, joints and wall anchors

• Seams run between the letters where they can. Among the seam positions that give the same number of pieces and fit your bed, the app picks those that cross the fewest letters. When a seam has to cross a letter, the letter is split between the letter pieces of both panels. A sliver narrower than 5 mm joins the neighbouring letter piece instead, and a sliver under 2 mm that has to stay on its own gets a warning: it may break when you glue it in.
• Joints keep clear of the openings. Spline recesses and strips stop 1.2 mm short of a letter, and puzzle tabs keep 1 mm away. A strip is only kept where it has enough glue area on both pieces (a quarter of the strip width squared: 25 mm² with the default 10 mm strip). When no strip fits on a seam, the app warns you: glue that seam edge to edge instead.
• Wall anchors stay out of the letters. Anchors and separator feet keep their own radius plus 1 mm (about 8 mm for an anchor on the capsule system) away from every opening, and the back labels stay out of the openings too. Anchors therefore sit in the panel around the letters, and the default 12 mm margin is often too narrow for them.
• The margin widens for the anchors. With screw mounts on and Automatic or Fixed grid anchor placement, the app widens the margin until every piece has room for an anchor, and tells you the margin it used: the MAKER sign of a new design, switched to raised letters, gets 18 mm instead of 12 mm. The margin grows in 0.5 mm steps, by at most about 37 mm on the capsule system with the default screws and never beyond 80 mm; a margin that already works is kept. With the Straight seam shape, the app also tries the Auto seams (stepped horizontal seams) and uses them instead, with a warning, when they give more pieces room for an anchor or need a narrower margin, or when straight seams would cut off a sliver or leave out holes that stepped seams keep, even if that takes a wider margin. Setting the reported margin yourself gives the same sign without the notice. Manual keeps your margin as it is (and suggests one that works), so set the reported margin yourself before you switch a raised sign to it.
• Nothing hangs loose. With butt or puzzle joints, a piece that has no anchor and that no tab ties to an anchored neighbour gets glued spline strips on its seams anyway, as on every board, and the app names the piece.
• Parts of the board inside a letter. Where a big letter covers a whole part of the board, that part has no panel: its letter piece keeps the part’s label (for example B4-L with no panel B4) or joins a neighbouring letter piece. Spline strips and their recesses keep out of such a part, as they keep out of the letters.

Putting raised letters together

Board settings

Slicing, joints, wall anchors, separators, labels, pegboard type, panel profile and border or hole-ring paint behave exactly as described in Infinite pegboard and Settings every workflow shares. A sign made of several boards (Per word or Per line) handles its wall anchors like this:

• Automatic (by load) lays out the rows of each board on the same lattice of hole-safe spots; rows of different boards at the same height share one line in the drilling guide.
• Fixed grid puts the grid on each board: 3 × 4 on a two-word sign gives up to 24 anchors, so short words and lower lines are never left without one. The Mounting and Summary tabs show the real total.
• Manual anchors can go anywhere on the sign; each is used by the board it lands on.
• Glued strips only join the pieces of one board, so every word or line board needs anchors of its own.

Recipes