Single line fonts for Glowforge

The Glowforge app gives artwork three treatments. Engrave rasters the laser back and forth across the whole shape like an inkjet printer, which is beautiful for photos and painfully slow for text. Cut goes straight through. Score is the sweet spot for lettering: the head follows the line once at high speed and leaves a crisp burned line. The catch is that Score follows whatever path your artwork gives it, and text set in a normal font is an outline, so scoring it draws hollow double-walled letters. A single-line file gives Score one centerline per stroke, which is exactly what it wants.

You do not need Premium fonts for this

The Glowforge app's built-in text tool draws from a fixed font list, and the nicest parts of it sit behind the Premium subscription. None of that applies to uploaded artwork: an SVG of your words is just a design file, and the free plan uploads it fine. That also means you are not limited to anyone's font catalog. Use the free fonts here, convert a font you already own with the font to single line converter, or score gift tags in your own handwriting with the handwriting font generator.

When you want a solid look, hatch it

If a hairline score is too delicate, do not fall back to a slow Engrave. The hatch option above packs each letter with parallel score lines, so the text reads as solid while every line still runs at Score speed. It is the trick production shops use to fake a fill in a tenth of the time.