You bought a monogram cut file. It is beautiful. The customer wants their name in it instead of the placeholder, and they want it in a different font than the one it came with.

If you know how to do this, that one file becomes an unlimited product. If you do not, you are buying a new file every time somebody orders, and your margin is going out the door one purchase at a time.

Changing the font in a bought cut file takes about three minutes in Inkscape. Here is the whole process, including the part that trips everybody up.

When you buy a cut file, the text in it is almost never text any more. The seller converted it to paths before they sold it, because that is what makes the file cut correctly on any machine regardless of what fonts the buyer has installed.

So you open the file, click on the name, reach for the font dropdown, and nothing happens. The letters are outlines now. They are shapes, not characters.

You cannot change the font of a shape. What you can do is delete the shape and put new text in its place, matched to the design. That is the actual job.

1. Open the file and figure out what is text and what is not.

Open the SVG in Inkscape. Click on the name. Look at the status bar at the bottom — it tells you what you selected. If it says Text, you got lucky and you can just retype it. If it says Path or Group, the text has been converted and you are doing the full process.

2. Isolate the text piece.

Ungroup with Ctrl+Shift+G, two or three times. Click just the name. If the whole design highlights, you have not ungrouped enough. Keep going until you can select the name on its own.

3. Measure before you delete.

This is the step people skip and then regret. Before the old text is gone, write down:

Take a screenshot of the whole design too. You are going to want a reference for where things sat.

4. Delete the old name. With just the name selected, hit Delete.

5. Type the new name.

Text tool, click somewhere in empty space, type the name. Do not type it on top of the design; you want it out in the open where you can work on it.

6. Pick the font.

Open Text and Font with Shift+Ctrl+T. Scroll and pick. Two things matter for plasma:

7. Match the arch, if there was one.

If the original name curved, draw an ellipse, select the text and the ellipse, Text then Put on Path, and resize the ellipse until the curve matches your screenshot. Then delete the ellipse.

8. Size and position it.

Select the new text, type the width you wrote down into the W box, make sure the lock icon between W and H is closed so the height follows. Then put the X and Y values back in. The name lands exactly where the old one was.

9. Object to Path. Shift+Ctrl+C. Now it is geometry.

10. Bridge the counters. Every enclosed area — the middle of an O, A, D, R, B — needs bridges or it falls out on the table.

11. Union it into the design, if it needs to be attached. Select the name and whatever it should connect to and hit Ctrl+Plus.

The name comes out a different visual weight than the design. A heavy design with a delicate name looks unbalanced. Match weight to weight. If the design is chunky, use a chunky font.

The letters do not fit the space. A long name in a layout built for a short one. Do not squash the text — that distorts the letterforms and it always shows. Either use a narrower font, or reduce the letter size and re-centre, or change the layout so the name gets two lines.

Licensing. Not every font is free to use on things you sell. Most of what ships with Windows is licensed for personal use only in the commercial sense that matters here. Fonts from Google Fonts are free for commercial use, full stop, and there are a couple of thousand of them. Font Squirrel filters by commercial licence too. It costs nothing to use a font you are definitely allowed to use.

The same caution applies to the design itself. If you bought a cut file, check whether the seller's licence lets you sell finished products cut from it. Most do. Some do not. Read it once.

The people who work fast do not browse fonts. They have five or six they use for everything:

Install those, learn what each one does at cutting size, and stop shopping.


[Watch: Learn How to Change Fonts in Cut Files with Inkscape](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSsTTSGEpTA)

The monogram templates in the [free cut file library](https://www.tinmanmetalworks.com/blog/free-cnc-plasma-cut-files) are set up so the name swaps out cleanly — the layout is spaced for it and the arch is already there. Practise on one of those before you take a scalpel to a design a customer is waiting on.

For the whole workflow from design to price tag, the [Tin Man Metal Works masterclass](https://www.tinmanmetalworks.com/start-today) covers it in order.

The text in a bought file is outlines, not text. Measure the old name's width, height and position, delete it, type the new name, pick a font heavy enough to cut, match the arch with an ellipse, type the measurements back in, Object to Path, bridge the counters, and union it to the design. Three minutes once, and one purchased file becomes a product you can sell forever.