How to Test Your Engraving Layout At Home

When determining what to engrave on an item you can use this technique at home to see if your desired message will fit on the product you would like engraved:

• Open Microsoft Word or some other word processing software. 
• Using your top and left hand page rulers as a guide, determine your maximum engravable area based on the product you would like engraved.  If you are purchasing an item from a store they should be able to provide the engravable area dimensions to you.   For example, if your engravable area is 2” x 1” then you would want to stay left of the 2” mark on the top ruler and above 1” on the left hand ruler.
• Start writing your text in the top left of your document being careful not to go past your maximum engravable width.  Use the Enter key to start a new line as needed until you reach your maximum engravable height.  You can adjust your line spacing if the default puts your new text lines too far below the last ones. 
• If your text fits in the virtual area then it is likely it will fit in the engravable area.  If your text does not fit you can slowly lower the font size until all of the text fits (hopefully).  If you can not get all of the text to fit using a size 9 font or larger you should consider shortening your message before decreasing the font size.
• It is very important to note that every font will be a slightly different size given the same font size.  For example, Times New Roman in size 12 font is slightly smaller in actual size than Arial size 12 font.  For this reason it is very important to do this test in the closest font that you can to the actual font you want engraved to ensure the text will fit.
• Since it is hard to judge actual size of something on a computer screen you should always print out your test sample.  The printed page will be pretty close to the actual engraving size so you can clearly see if the font size and style you chose are going to look OK on the actual product.  Say you had your document zoomed in on your computer while performing this exercise and determined that a size 6 Arial font seems like it will be plenty big enough based on how it looks on the screen so you tell the engraver to go ahead with your text.  Well the engraving may look great, but the recipient may need a magnifying glass to read it!