Does anyone knoe of software specific to model rr’s? I’ve just about given up on getting NKP decal, except off of E-Bay. . Thanks in advance. Randy Staller
Sorry to say, there is no special decal software that will do the work. Most decal manufacturers draw their artwork with a vector based software package such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. There are also several lower cost versions out there as well. To make decals requires a good knowledge of the software package and a good amount of artistic ability. I use Illustrator to do all of my decal work and can have fron a couple of hours up to several days to do the art for a decal package. I do have some nickel plate artwork already done. What are you looking for? contact me off list.
Dan Pikulski
Railfonts (http://www.railfonts.com) has a Nickel Plate font for sale that that you could use with word processing software to lay out the lettering.
What sort of Nickel Plate set are you looking for? (equipment type, scale, etc.)
Have you checked: http://www.microscale.com/
WOW! They’re expensive!
Actually, as fonts go, they’re not so bad, especially for specialty fonts.
Professional-grade fonts tend to start around $20 per face and style and go up from there. A full set with italics, varying weights of bold and modifications for various type sizes can run up to $300 or more from the professional type foundries.
To get the Futura style the C&O used on equipment and on structure signs in the 1960s, it cost me $42 ($21 apiece) to get both Futura Bold and Futura Medium from Linotype GmbH.
Professionally designed fonts and custom-made railroad fonts are in a different league from the “200 Funky Fonts for $9.95” type of discs, in design, quality and price.
fmilhaupt- Yeah! I stand corrected on that one! I priced some other fonts after I made that post. [:O] I never realized companies charge $40-$60 for a single font! I guess I’m used to buying a disk of 500 generic fonts for $20. My bad![:I]
Very different. I spent the worst two years of my career doing support for a company that tried to do a lot of desktop publishing on the cheap. They’d buy these cheap knockoff font CDs (or download fonts from the Internet), and then they’d have various weird printing problems, usually on deadline. Then they’d end up paying my department $50 an hour to find the problem and work around it. I managed to convince a couple of departments, after about two years, that it was a lot cheaper in the long run to buy their fonts from quality, time-tested sources than it was to pay for me to work around their problems. Paying me was expensive, and missing deadlines is very expensive, and it was very stressful and frustrating for all people involved too. Some of the other departments never learned–they’d just complain they were losing half a million dollars an hour (totally made up figures, BTW), and they didn’t like it when my response was that if they’re losing half a million an hour, they probably can afford to spend $400 on the quality fonts they needed.
Incidentally, if you don’t want to pay $60 each for quality fonts, Corel bundles a decent selection of high-quality fonts with many of their products. Often you can pick up an older version of Corel Draw or Corel Wordperfect for around $50. Even if you have no interest in the software itself, the fonts (which you can install separately) are worth a whole lot more than that.
If you want to print your own decals on blank decal paper, which is what I gather from the way you worded the question, if you can find a photo with sharp detail, shot square to the surface of the prototype, you should be able to digitize, then trim out the logo you want. Then it’s just a matter of printing out the logo.
I do all of mine with MS Word and MS Paint. For text, I either use a standard font, or a free download. For example, this is the free “Goldrush” font, drawn using the “Word Art” feature of MS Word:
(Click on the image for a larger view.) The “Strumpet Gal” graphic on the rear door of the truck was downloaded. For the other door, I flipped the image. I use Insert-Picture-From File in Word to import the graphic files, and then I can size them correctly and print them out.
This trolley also uses the Goldrush font, but here I just printed it straight in a different color:
If you’re really trying to get professional-quality results, then I would recommend buying the decals you want from Microscale. For one thing, they’ll sell you white lettering, which you can’t do on your home computer, because our home printers just don’t do white. For the kind of modelling I do, though, the images are small, and chances are I’m going to dirty them up anyway. I intentionally put advertising on uneven, poor-quality surfaces to get a weathered look, like this Moxie sign decalled directly on a wood fence made of coffee stirrers:
Again, I downloaded the image, and tweaked it a bit in MS Paint, then printed it from Word.
I use an odd method but it works for me. I import a picture of what I want into AutoCAD and then draw and trace the outline. This then gets saved and imported into Draw 9 that I bought off Ebay for about $45. I tweek everything in Draw, make up the different color layers and then send the file over to my old Windows98 computer that drives my Alps printer.
Maybe not the best way but I know how to use AutoCAD and didn’t have the time to invest in becoming a Draw 9 expert. I was trying to make L&N decals for hopper cars that are kitbashed so off-the-shelf decals were of no use. The ampersand “&” and the “L” and the “N” are two different fonts with none really an exact match for the ampersand when overlaid on a prototype scan. Hard to justify dropping more than a few buck to get two letters and the ampersand.