Here’s the moment every first-time maker experiences: you cut a beautiful name out of brass, lift it from the laser bed - and the dot of the i stays behind. So does the centre of the a, and that elegant gap in the script font just became three separate pieces of metal. A pendant has to be one object. This post explains why fonts fail, and what “welding” and “bridging” actually mean.
Why ordinary fonts fall apart
Three different problems hide inside typed text:
- Disconnected glyphs. In most fonts, letters simply don’t touch. Cut “MAYA” in a block font and you get four separate letters, not a necklace.
- Floating marks. The dot of an i or j; in Devanagari, the bindu (dot) and detached matras; in Gujarati, the anusvara. These are islands with nothing holding them.
- Counters that must NOT be removed. The holes inside a, o, or श are supposed to fall out - that’s the design. The trick is telling deliberate holes apart from accidental islands.
Welding: turning overlaps into one outline
Script and cursive fonts get you halfway: their letters overlap. But an overlap is not a weld - as vector shapes, they’re still separate paths stacked on top of each other, and many laser workflows will cut both outlines, slicing through the joint. Welding (a boolean union) merges every overlapping shape into one continuous outline, so the beam travels around the whole name once.
Doing it by hand: type the name, convert text to outlines, select all, then Unite (Illustrator Pathfinder) or Union (Inkscape). That solves the overlaps - but not the floaters.
Bridging: rescuing the floating pieces
Anything still disconnected after the union needs a bridge - a deliberate sliver of material connecting the island to the main body. Done well, bridges are nearly invisible: hairline-thin, placed where the eye expects a connection (a dot bridged straight down to its stem, a matra bridged into the headline), and thick enough to survive the laser’s kerf. Done badly, they look like scaffolding. By hand this is the slow part: draw a small rectangle, position it, re-unite, check - for every single floater, for every single name.
Indian scripts raise the difficulty
Devanagari (Hindi and Marathi) comes with a gift and a trap. The gift is the shirorekha - the headline that naturally connects letters into a word. The trap is everything above and beside it: bindus, chandrabindus, and vowel signs like the ikar that curves ahead of its consonant, all floating free. Gujarati has no headline at all, so every junction between letters needs welding or bridging. This is why generic “text to SVG” tools fail for Hindi and Gujarati name jewellery: the script knowledge has to be built in.
How GemTheName automates the whole chain
- The name is set in a calligraphic jewellery typeface and every glyph is flattened to precise curves.
- A boolean union welds all overlapping shapes - letters into the shirorekha, flourishes into letters.
- The engine then counts the remaining islands and auto-bridges them: for each floater it finds the nearest point on the main body and adds a hairline connector, then re-unions and re-checks, iterating until exactly one piece remains.
- Deliberate counters (the holes that should fall out) are preserved throughout - they’re part of the outline’s interior, not islands.
- Finally the design is verified: if the outline isn’t a single connected piece, it doesn’t ship. The QC result is shown right in the designer (“✓ Single piece - ready to cut”).
Checklist before you cut any name file
- One continuous outline - no disconnected islands.
- Counters (intentional holes) intact.
- Bridges at least ~0.5 mm wide at your cutting size.
- Real-unit dimensions (mm), not arbitrary pixels.
- A test cut before a production run.
Or skip the checklist: generate the name and the welding, bridging and verification happen in the two seconds before your preview appears.