Stencil maker for cutting: letters, numbers and pictures

That is a bridge, and without it there is no stencil. The middle of an "O" touches nothing else on the sheet: cut the letter along its outline and the disc simply drops out. The same happens with A, B, D, P, R, Q, with zero and eight, and with any light patch enclosed inside a picture. A bridge is a narrow uncut strip holding that piece to the sheet. On the painted surface it shows as a thin break in the line, and that is what stencil lettering is supposed to look like.

It depends on the material. For mylar film of 0.15-0.25 mm the working range is 1.5-3 mm; adhesive vinyl is fine at 2 mm; paper and card stock prefer 2.5-3 mm; plastic of 0.5-1 mm wants 3-3.5 mm. Nothing goes below one millimeter on any material: a bridge that thin tears while you are weeding the cut-outs and again on the first pass of a roller. Picking the material fills these numbers in, and the slider leaves them adjustable.

For one-off use, heavy paper of 160-200 g/m2 or thin card is enough — you cut it with a craft knife straight off the print, but paint softens the edges and by the second or third use it warps. For something reusable, take polyester film (mylar) of 0.15-0.25 mm: it shrugs off water, washes clean and lasts dozens of runs. Adhesive vinyl has the advantage of sticking to the wall so paint cannot creep under the edge, but it is usually spent once removed. For walls and textured plaster, go thicker: 0.3-0.5 mm.

Set the width you want in centimeters and leave the sheet layout on. The PDF comes out as several pages: neighbors print the same strip of the drawing, the width of the overlap, so you align drawing to drawing rather than edge to edge — and the alignment crosses sit inside that band for exactly this. Trim each sheet along the dashed line and lay it over the next. The first page is an assembly map: a thumbnail of the whole with a numbered grid of pages.

Almost always the printer driver: a "fit to page" or "shrink to printable area" checkbox takes 2-6% off the sheet, which on a meter-wide stencil is 2-6 centimeters. In the print dialog choose 100% or "Actual size". You can check without measuring the whole thing: every sheet carries a bar labeled 50 mm — hold a ruler against it. If it is short, the print went out at the wrong scale, and the fix is to reprint rather than to compensate while tracing.

For a cutting plotter, "SVG (cut)": the outline is a stroke with no fill and the size is written in millimeters, so Design Space and Silhouette Studio take the stencil at its true size instead of scaling it to the mat. For lasers and CNC, DXF, also in millimeters. "SVG (filled)" and PNG are for dropping the stencil into somebody else's layout as a picture. PDF is for printing and cutting by hand.

Yes, though the result depends on the shot. Things with a clear silhouette against a light background work well: a profile, a leaf, a tool, an animal side-on. Portraits in soft light and shots where the subject blends into the background work badly — after thresholding they break into blotches. The three modes help differently: "by brightness" for a contrasty shot, "adaptive" for a photo with uneven light, "outline" when you want line art rather than a silhouette. The thicker/thinner slider rescues details that came out narrower than the material allows.

When the paint goes on from the other side rather than through the front. The common cases are lettering on glass or a shop window read from outside, transferring a drawing onto skin or wood through carbon paper, painting the inside face of a transparent surface, and heat transfer, where the film is laid face down. All of them need a mirrored layout, otherwise the text reads right to left.

For one or two characters, type the character, open "Stencil size" and press "A4 sheet": it fits the page. The whole alphabet or all ten digits at once come from "Set: one character per sheet" on the Text tab — a single PDF, a page per character and one shared scale, so the digits are the same height and a wide "W" does not end up shorter than a narrow "1". Whether the set is available on your plan is shown by the mark next to its button.