How Small Is Too Small? Laser Engraving Text

Small laser engraved and scored text can be unreadable. We’ve put together some information and examples to help you in the design phase to choose the right font size for your project.

Engraving essentially ‘colours in’ the text, and scoring will mark the material along the text outline.

Material choice affects the legibility of text as different power settings are used for different material – the more dense the material the higher the power settings should be. As a general rule, higher power settings require larger font sizes. For example, smaller text (10pt) is much more legible on paper than is is on acrylic, as acrylic requires much higher power settings.

We generally recommend using font sizes of 10pt and above for engraving and 12pt and above for scoring.

See below images of a range of text sizes across a range of materials.