Text to STL generator

Need a name for a door, letters for a sign, a label for a drawer or a word to glue onto a cake topper? Type it into the box above and you get a 3D model of the text that you can print right away. The preview rebuilds as you type, so you see the real shape, size and thickness before you download anything.

The generator lays the text out letter by letter. That means letter spacing, line spacing and alignment all work the way they do in a word processor, and the model is centred so it lands in the middle of your build plate. You can add a backing plate behind the letters and download a 3MF in which the plate and the text are separate parts, ready for a two-colour print.

How to turn text into an STL

1. Type your text in the Text box. Press Enter for a new line; each line can be centred, left or right aligned.
2. Choose a font. Eight fonts are built in, from round sans-serif to serif. Under More options you can upload your own .ttf or .otf file, so a brand font or a favourite script works too.
3. Set the size. Letter height and thickness are under More options. The size line under the preview shows the finished width, depth and height in millimetres.
4. Download. Download STL gives one solid file. The 3MF link keeps the backing plate and the letters as two objects.

Choosing letter height and thickness

"Letter height" is the font size, the same number you would pick in a word processor. Depending on the font, tall letters such as H, l and k come out close to that number and lowercase letters smaller; the size line under the preview always shows the exact finished height. For a house sign, 25 to 40 mm reads well from the street. For drawer and shelf labels, 8 to 12 mm is plenty. For anything below 6 mm, choose a bold font and check that the thinnest strokes are still at least 0.8 mm wide, because a 0.4 mm nozzle cannot print a line much thinner than twice its own width.

Thickness is how far the letters stick out. Standalone letters you will glue onto something look good at 3 to 6 mm. Letters standing on a backing plate need only 1 to 2 mm to read clearly, and that keeps the print short. With the plate turned on, the generator puts the text on top of the plate, so the total height is plate thickness plus letter thickness.

Fonts: built in or your own

The built-in fonts (Helvetiker, Optimer, Gentilis and Droid, in regular and bold) come under open licences that allow commercial use, so the letters you print are fine on items you sell. They cover the Latin alphabet with accents. For other scripts such as Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hindi or Japanese, upload a font that contains those characters: tick Use my own font file and choose the .ttf or .otf. Fonts from Google Fonts work well and are licensed for commercial use.

Script and handwriting fonts often have letters that touch or overlap. That is what you want for a name sign, because the whole word prints as one piece. If the letters overlap too much and look blobby, add 0.5 to 1 mm of letter spacing under More options.

Adding a backing plate

Tick Add a backing plate to put a rounded rectangle behind the text. The plate grows with the text and keeps an even margin around it, set in millimetres. A plate makes small text much stronger, gives you a flat surface to glue or screw to a wall, and lets you print two colours: a dark plate with white letters, or the reverse.

On a printer with an AMS or a tool changer, open the 3MF and give the plate and the letters different filaments. On a single-nozzle printer, slice the STL and add a filament change at the first layer above the plate (in Bambu Studio and PrusaSlicer, right-click the layer slider; in Cura use the Pause at Height script).

Ideas that work well

• Name signs and door plates with a backing plate and two screw holes drilled after printing.
• Cake toppers and party letters: use a script font, no plate, 3 mm thick, and add a stick from a separate print.
• Shelf and drawer labels: 10 mm letters on a 2 mm plate, printed in one go.
• Logos and wordmarks: upload the brand font. For a logo with graphics, use the SVG to STL converter instead.
• Keychains: the keychain generator adds a ring hole and a plate sized for a key ring.

If something looks wrong

Some characters are missing

The font does not contain them. Built-in fonts cover Latin letters, numbers and common symbols; emoji and other alphabets need your own font file.

The holes in letters like O and A are filled

That happens with some uploaded fonts that draw holes in the wrong direction. Try another font, or the regular weight of the same family.

The text is too wide for my printer

Lower the letter height, or split the text over two lines with Enter. The size line shows the new width straight away.

Updated November 2026 · How these tools work