I've tried various methods to carve letters into a cylinder (ring), and Michael's method seems to be the most direct and reliable way.

It would be great to have an "Emboss" function that performed the intermediate steps behind the scenes and worked kinda like the projection function.

Create some closed shapes (letters or other shapes), position over the main solid (cylinder, sphere, block, ring, etc), hit "Emboss", enter the depth [ + or -] , press Done :)

Ed