Hello!  I am working on a project to cut our some letters and add lights to them for a Holiday display this year.  I am stuck on getting the lights within the letters and hope that you can help me.  I have attached some examples of old Las Vegas signs and how they used to have a large number of lights spaced so well within them.  It wasn't just a grid were they removed the lights that wouldn't "make it."  I have been trying to use inset to build a path and then distribute lights (holes) but have had little luck.  Anyone have any insight on how to do this?  Manually doing each letter is tedious work to say the least.  Thank you so much for your help!

Attached a few examples of what I am going for in effect from the Neon Museum as well as a number and me trying to trace offsets from inkscape.  Eventually I would hide the inset paths was my idea but couldn't ever figure out how to get the circles to follow and distribute well.  

Here's my take. (Compressed svg attached because there's a lot of nodes here.)

oooooooooooooo okay.... I will report back with my results tomorrow :) Thank you!