Solved it by extruding the text 2mm, putting the base line 1mm from the top, flowing so the 2mm text is 1mm inside the body and 1mm outside of the body, and then boolean.
Hi Andy, it sounds like you've got your boolean worked out. So yes it tends to be good to have the cutting objects push all the way through the other object's surface by a little bit instead of having pieces that just barely skim over each other with nearly coincident surface areas.
The skimming type case can make calculating the intersections a lot more difficult.
