The text under the code: how many letters fit

By Tiehl Roberto Matías · 6 min read · Updated 27 October 2026

Leer en español

Under the code there is room for a short phrase: «scan the menu», the name of the place, a phone number. It is the part of the piece people think about least, and the one that most easily comes out wrong, because the generator shrinks the lettering to make it fit and there comes a point where the nozzle can no longer draw it.

How the generator places the text

The text goes in a band under the code, the same width as it. The height of that band depends on the piece and its size: on a small keychain it is 6 mm, on a 90 mm plate it is 9, and from there it grows with the piece.

Inside the band, the generator writes with a heavy lettering at 82 % of the available height, and measures how much room it takes. If it fits across, it stays that size. If it does not fit, it shrinks it until it does. That is why short texts all come out at the same size, and why past a certain number of characters every letter you add makes all the others smaller.

That is convenient, because the text never runs off the piece. But it has a consequence you cannot see on screen: in the preview the shrunken text looks perfect at any size, and the printer cannot draw at any size.

The stroke, not the height

What decides whether a letter comes out is not how tall it is, but how thick its stroke is. And with the typeface the generator uses, the stroke is 14 % of the body of the letter. When the text shrinks, the stroke shrinks with it.

The rule for coming out crisp is the same as for the modules of the code, which the minimum size guide explains: the nozzle has to be able to go over each stroke twice, so 0.8 mm with a 0.4 nozzle. Translated into letters, that asks for a capital at least 4 mm tall.

With a single pass the letter prints and reads up close, but with soft edges: the corners round off, the gaps in an A or an R close up a little, the 3 and the 8 start to look alike. And below the width of the nozzle itself, the letter comes out as a squashed thread or does not come out at all.

How many letters each piece takes

Measured with the generator, with text in capitals of the «SCAN THE MENU» kind. Wide letters like M or W take more room and narrow ones like I take less, so allow a margin of a couple of characters either way:

Piece	Maximum stroke	Crisp letters	Letters at one pass
Keychain 35 or 40 mm	0.69 mm	none	up to 13 or 17
Keychain 50 mm	0.80 mm	up to 11	up to 21
Keychain 60 mm	0.96 mm	up to 13	all 26
Plate 70 mm	1.03 mm	up to 15	all 26
Plate 90 mm	1.03 mm	up to 22	all 26
Plate 120 mm or more	1.31 mm	all 26	all 26
Desk stand 70 mm	0.92 mm	up to 15	all 26
Desk stand 90 mm	1.14 mm	up to 21	all 26

Twenty-six is the most the text field takes. The middle column is the one to look at: in it the lettering comes out with two passes and clean edges.

A concrete case: the example text the generator comes with, «SCAN THE MENU», is 13 characters. On the 90 mm desk stand it comes out crisp with room to spare. On a 70 mm plate it still falls inside the fifteen that piece takes, but only just: anything longer stops being crisp.

The keychain, a case of its own

On a keychain under 50 mm, the text band is 6 mm and the largest lettering that fits has a 0.69 mm stroke. No text comes out crisp, not even a four-letter one: the limit is set by the height, not by the width.

There are three ways out. The first, no text at all: the code already says what to do, and the keychain comes out shorter. The second, a keychain of 50 mm or more, where a short name already fits cleanly. The third, a finer nozzle: with a 0.2 the stroke you need halves, to 0.4 mm, and the 40 mm keychain takes about 17 letters.

What does not work is raising the relief so the lettering shows up more. Relief makes it taller, not wider, and width is what is missing.

What the text costs

The text does not take room from the code: the square of the code is the same size with text or without. What it does is make the piece longer. A 90 mm plate goes from 95 to 106 mm tall, and a 40 mm keychain from 48 to 56.

It sounds like little, but it counts in two places. On the bed, because a longer piece is one row fewer in a batch, as the batch guide shows. And wherever the piece ends up: a taller desk stand hides more, and a longer tag is more of a nuisance on a collar.

Emoji in relief

The generator lets you put an emoji next to the text, and on screen it comes out in all its colours. On the piece it comes out as something else, and it is worth knowing that before choosing one.

To make the relief, the generator only looks at where there is drawing and where there is not, not what colour it is. Everything with colour in it becomes solid relief, and everything inside the outline of the emoji comes out at the same height. The emoji becomes its silhouette.

That has very different consequences depending on the emoji. A coffee cup, a key, a heart or a star have a silhouette you recognise, and they come out well; the cup and the key even keep the hole in the handle and in the eye. A smiling face becomes a smooth circle, because the eyes and the mouth are inside the outline. A pizza becomes a solid triangle. Choose the emoji by how its filled outline looks, not by how it looks on screen.

One more detail: the emoji is not drawn by the generator, it is drawn by your system. The same cup has one shape on Windows, another on a Mac and another on Android, so the silhouette of your piece depends on the computer you generate it from. If the piece matters, look at the 3D preview before downloading: the silhouette is already visible there, without colours.

What to write

With so few characters, the text has to do one single job. Nearly always the most useful one is to say what happens when you scan: «MENU», «WIFI», «REVIEWS», «ORDERS». A code with no explanation is a square people do not know whether it is worth scanning. The reviews guide has example phrases for that case.

If you do not know how much fits, the short rule is this: up to 15 characters come out crisp on any plate or stand of 70 mm or more. Above that, look at the table. And in the slicer preview, before printing, look at the layer where the text starts: if the letters appear as loose lines instead of closed outlines, the stroke is a single pass.