Text to STL
Type a word, pick a font, and get a 3D printable solid — with a warning before it prints badly, not after.
Letters standing on a backing plate. One piece, prints flat.
Font
Heavy — best for printing
Plain text
Display
Script
All seventeen are under the SIL Open Font License and served from this site rather than a font CDN, so the page keeps working offline once it has loaded. Each licence ships beside its font — the one for Anton is here.
The plate
No account, no upload, no watermark. Need a logo instead of words? SVG to STL · Image to STL
How to convert text to an STL
Type your text
Type into the box and it appears as a solid straight away. Enter starts a new line. Pick a font from the list — the heavy ones at the top print best.
Choose how it sits
On a plate, letters only, engraved into a plate or cut clean through it. Set the letter height in millimetres and how far the letters stand off.
Read the warnings, then download
If the letters would print loose, a stroke lands under your nozzle or a piece would fall out, it says so and how to fix it. Then download STL, 3MF or OBJ.
What actually happens to your text
A font is not a picture of letters, it is a set of closed curves, and that is the whole reason this comes out clean. The font file is read directly, glyph by glyph, and the curves are turned into outlines at the size you asked for. The result is exact geometry: the bowl of an O is a smooth loop, not a polygon recovered from pixels, and the counter inside it is a hole because it encloses nothing rather than because something guessed.
Then it is extruded. Every piece is a closed solid — caps top and bottom, walls raised from exactly the edges the caps left exposed — so what a slicer gets has no gaps to fall through. A plate with raised letters is a plate solid plus one solid per letter standing on it, which is how a CAD program writes a part made of several features and what every slicer expects. It is checked: every font in the picker is built in every mode and the file is read back and audited before it ships.
What it will not do is pretend. Bare letters really are separate objects and the tool counts them rather than letting you find out at the printer. A stroke thinner than your nozzle really will not print and it says so, with the height that would fix it. The middle of an O really does fall out of a stencil. Those three are most of why text prints badly, and none of them are visible on screen. Starting from a logo or a drawing rather than from words is a different job — that is the SVG to STL converter.
About the format
STL (from 'stereolithography', though the letters are also read as 'Standard Tessellation Language') was created by Chuck Hull at 3D Systems in 1987 for the first commercial stereolithography machine, and it has outlived nearly everything else from that era. The format describes a shape in the simplest way a shape can be described: as a list of triangles, each one given by three corner points and the direction its outward face points. There is no notion of a curve, so a cylinder is a fan of narrow flats and the smoothness depends entirely on how many triangles were spent on it. There is no colour, no units, no layers, no history and no way to say that two triangles belong to the same feature. That poverty is exactly why it survived: any program can write it and any program can read it, so it became the neutral handoff between modelling and printing. Files come in two flavours, a human readable ASCII form and a compact binary form that stores each triangle in fifty bytes, and the binary one is what practically everything writes today because the ASCII version runs several times larger. The one thing a printer genuinely needs from an STL is that the surface be closed, meaning every edge is shared by exactly two triangles so the solid has a well defined inside; a mesh with gaps leaves the slicer guessing where the material goes. Units are the standard trap, since the file carries none and every slicer simply assumes millimetres.
- Developer:
- 3D Systems
- Initial release:
- 1987
Frequently asked questions
How do I turn text into an STL?
Type it into the box on this page. It is turned into a solid as you type, and you can turn the model with the mouse to look at it. Set how tall the letters should be in millimetres, choose whether they sit on a plate, are sunk into one or are cut through it, then click Download STL. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.
Is it free, and do I need an account?
Free, no watermark, no size limit, and no account to make one or to download it. There is no paid tier of this tool to upsell you to.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. The font file is downloaded to your browser and everything after that — reading the glyph outlines, laying out the line, building the mesh — happens in the page. Your text never leaves the tab, which also means you can pull the network cable once the page has loaded and it keeps working.
What does the letter height actually measure?
The height of a capital letter, so setting 20 mm gives you an H exactly 20 mm tall. That is the number sign makers work in and the one that decides whether something is readable across a room. The full size of the model, including any plate and any descenders hanging below the line, is shown under the preview so there is no surprise on the bed.
My letters came out as separate pieces. Why?
Because letters do not touch each other. A word set as bare letters is not one object: it is one piece per letter, plus one for the dot on every i and j and one for every accent, and they all come off the bed loose. The tool counts the pieces and says so. Putting the text on a plate joins everything into a single object, which is what almost everyone actually wants.
Which font should I use for 3D printing?
A heavy one. The faces at the top of the picker have thick, even strokes that survive a nozzle at small sizes; the thin and script faces look better on screen and print worse. The tool measures the narrowest stroke in your actual text and compares it against your nozzle width, so you can try a delicate font and find out before printing rather than after.
Engraved or cut through — which do I want?
Engraved sinks the letters into the plate and leaves a floor under them, which is what you want for a sign you might fill with a second colour or paint. Cut through removes the letters entirely, which is what a stencil is. The difference matters most inside letters: cut through an O and the disc in the middle is holding on to nothing and drops out, exactly as it does on a real stencil. The tool says how many pieces would fall free.
Can I make a keychain or a name tag?
Yes, and it is what the plate settings are for. Put the text on a plate, round the corners, and open the keyring hole — the plate widens to make room for it rather than squeezing it into the margin, so the hole never breaks out through the edge. Three millimetres of plate and two of relief is a sound starting point.
Does it handle accents and non-English letters?
Yes, provided the font has them. Accented letters are usually stored as a base letter plus a mark placed by a transform rather than as one drawing, and both parts are read, so á, ô, ž, ł and ș come out correctly. Fonts differ in how far their character sets reach; if one is missing a letter you typed, the tool names the character rather than quietly dropping it or printing a box.
Can I use my own font?
Not yet. The fonts here are hosted with us under open licences that allow the file itself to be served, which is what a tool like this needs — a licence that only covers showing a font on a web page does not cover handing you its outlines as a solid. Uploading your own is on the list.
Which programs open the file?
Everything. STL is what every slicer reads — Cura, PrusaSlicer, Orca, Bambu Studio, Simplify3D — and the model is written in millimetres sitting on the bed with its corner at the origin, so it arrives at the size you set instead of needing to be scaled by eye. 3MF is the more modern container and the better choice for Bambu and Prusa; OBJ is there for Blender and the rest.
Why does it warn about a thin stroke when the letters look fine?
Because a nozzle cannot lay a line thinner than itself. A 0.4 mm nozzle asked for a 0.2 mm serif will either skip it or lay a 0.4 mm one, and both look wrong. The narrowest sustained stroke in your text is measured and compared with your nozzle, and the warning tells you the height at which it would clear. Tapered points — the tip of an A, the end of a serif — are ignored on purpose, because every font has them and no print fails because of them.