Technique4 min readUpdated
Type a name in a script font, cut it, and you get a pile of disconnected letters. The letters overlap on screen but each one is still its own closed path, so the blade dutifully cuts around every single one — including through the joins.
Add a text object and pick a script font with genuine overlap between characters.
Reduce letter spacing until adjacent characters visibly overlap. Touching is not enough — they must intersect.
Select the whole text object, or all the letters if you have already split them.
Run Weld. The overlapping outlines merge into a single closed path and the interior joins disappear.
Look at the outline. There should be one continuous boundary. If a letter still shows its own edge inside the word, it was not overlapping.
Weld merges geometry: several paths become one, permanently. Attach preserves geometry but pins pieces to a fixed relative position so the mat layout does not rearrange them.
Use weld for script text that must cut as one piece. Use attach for a layered design where the pieces need to stay put relative to each other but still cut separately — a score line on a card, for instance, which must not merge with the card outline.
Once welded, the individual letters are gone; you cannot edit the spelling afterwards. Duplicate the text object and hide the copy before welding, or rely on named version history so the pre-weld state is recoverable past undo depth.
A faint line remaining inside the welded outline means two paths touched but did not overlap. Nudge the letters closer by a hundredth of an inch and weld again — the merge needs genuine intersection, not adjacency.
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