Laser cutting letters simulation in Inkscape

[THX1138]

Hi. If you use a laser cutter to cut out letters from a piece of sheet material, the centers of letters such as a, b, d, e, g, o etc fall out. Is there a way to quickly make Inkscape simulate this, so all the letters with such parts are filled with a black void like they would be when cut out of wood in this way? I realise I could convert text to paths and then manually select the nodes to remove but that would be quite time consuming. Is there a smarter way? Thanks!

The screenshot shows an example I did manually.

[brynn]

I'm not clear what you're asking....  You want the enclosed area of letters to be solid black, right?  Do you necessarily care how the letters are made?

If you do Path menu > Union, and then Path menu > Break Apart, they will be filled with black.  But the text will no longer be text, and you will have some extra paths.  So if you want to cut it, the cutter might want to cut some things twice.  This is probably the fastest way though.

If you want the text to remain as text, you could use the Paint Bucket tool (with a positive Grow/Shrink value in the control bar) to fill them in.  Although the black fill would not be part of the text (it would be paths).

[Moini]

I'd reverse the order, Path > Break Apart, then Path > Union. Done.

[brynn]

I'd reverse the order, Path > Break Apart, then Path > Union. Done.

Break Apart works on text?

[Moini]

You're right. I expected it to, as Union works as well as difference...

So one would need to do a Path > Union , Path > Break apart, Path > Union. (It's for cutting, the internal paths need to be gone)

[brynn]

Oh, I see what you're thinking.

The way I read the message, I wasn't sure why THX wanted to do this.  It's still not clear to me anyway.