Test Sign Measurement Accuracy

We have provided a way to test the measurement accuracy of your fonts using our app.

This will allow you to manually measure the width, height and material length of any text combination with any font of your choosing.

What you'll need

• Adobe Illustrator (Free trial available)
• A material length customiser installed on your store with fonts added
• Setup a special pricing rule on your customiser for testing
• On the customiser and Adobe Illustrator, settings should be centimeters for the measurement unit

1. Create A Pricing Rule for Testing

1. Create a new pricing with only one price extension
2. Set the Base Price to 0
3. Set the Shipping Cost to 0
4. Set the Letter Material Cost to 1

2. Generate Sample SVG

1. Go to the page of your chosen font to test, if you don't have a font added yet follow this guide to add your font
2. Ensure the Pricing Rules that is assigned is the one you created for testing purpose

1. 

2. Click on Generate SVG to save the file

3. Adobe Illustrator Setup

1. After installing Illustrator, create a new document

   

2. On Adobe Illustrator option at the top, choose Preference > Units

   

3. Change the unit to Centimeters and save

   

4. On the Window option at the top, click on Document Info and ensure the window is present

   

4. Ready to test

1. Go to the customiser page on your storefront

2. Choose the same font and text used for the SVG file

   

3. Choose a size and take note of the width, height and price (material length)

   

4. On Illustrator, choose File > Place and select the generated SVG

   

5. Make sure to click once on the artboard to place the SVG

   

6. Once you have the SVG selected (e.g. highlighted with the box around the image)[1], go to Properties on the rightmost panel and match the width of the SVG with the customiser text width.

   

7. On the Document Info, the first line should include the total path length. Divide this length by 2 to get the final length [3].

   

   671.3898 / 2 = 335.6949

8. Compare the AI values with the customiser version. In this example, we have:

   AI values

   Width = 32.32cm Height = 16.749cm

   Customiser values

   Width = 32.32cm Height = 16.75cm

9. Finally to compare the material length accuracy which is used to produce a signs price do the following.

   1. AI Path Value

   Path = 335.6949cm

   2. Price from your Customiser found in step 3

   $335.70

   In this example, we are a faction of a cent difference for the price to measurement accuracy and can now be confident this font will work perfectly well with our material length pricing model. If there is a larger difference you can now use this difference as a price addition multiplier to the material cost when entering in your pricing for this font.

10. And done! You can repeat this process with any font of your choosing.

Notes

1. If the SVG is not selected, use the Selection tool on the left and click and drag around the image to select

   

2. If it does not adjust to the width, make sure the icon beside it is a linked chain similar to the image below, which can be changed by clicking on it.

   

3. The reason for this is the SVG paths follows the edges of the shapes and we only need the middle equivalent.