My wife’s great-granny had a handwritten red velvet cake recipe, and I wanted to engrave it on an acacia tray. Rather than trace every letter by hand, I used Vectable to convert photos of the recipe cards into SVG files.
The first conversion wasn’t fully consistent, so I had to repair some problem areas, clean up both cards in xTool Studio, and combine them into one layout. I tried offset tests and alternate conversions until I had a version that kept the handwriting and would still engrave well.
Then I positioned the design on the tray and engraved it with settings for acacia. One thing to know going in: the grain varies enough that the engraving can look uneven even when the artwork and laser setup are right.
You could use this same approach for cutting boards, signs, or other keepsakes with handwriting on them. A conversion service saves a lot of tracing time, but you still need to check and clean up the vector before it’s ready.