Times

First of all thanks to both of you for offering some advise. I am playing with both ideas offered, been playing with all sorts of different ways to save projects both raw text and after converting it. Converting it does offer a fairly complete looking image in VM, when I vectorize the project and trace it for cutting the results are horrible. There are gaps in the middle of a letter or letters are connected or missing segments especially where any kind of thin lettering may be, I thought it was the thickness of the lettering but even stretching the project to huge proportions it still makes the mistakes with letters 6 inches tall but if I take the exact same font used and make the word in VM, it works perfectly and a letter that would not outline properly at 6 inches when imported will outline perfectly at 1 inch tall......... There seems to be a problem with the software recognizing any thin lettering not created in VM. Large and blocky fonts seem to work pretty well unless I arch it and that can mess it up as well.

Not sure what you mean about converting curved text, there is nothing to convert, I made it curved from the start. But even the regular text below is jumbled up or completely missing so this is part of my confusion, nothing I make in Illustrator properly opens up in VM.

So I am a new user and trying to figure this cutter and software out but this seems pretty difficult. I am creating very basic projects in Illustrator, saving them and when imported the Vinyl Master program scrambles things severely and the cut paths are distorted and messed up. So most of the time I have to come up with ideas in Illustrator then try to rebuild them in the Vinyl Master program to print them because it can;t import them without making mistakes. For example, I am at a complete stand still on a memorial project, I want to have "In Loving Memory Of" in arched writing over a very basic cross then a name and dates underneath, took me less than 5 minutes to design it in Illustrator and save it, but when I attempt to open it in Vinyl master the text is all screwed up and overlapping the cross, it is a complete mess. So then I try to import it as an image but the outliner can't follow the text properly and it makes massive mistakes it is impossible to cut this out and it is extremely basic and simple so I fear even trying to do anything more complex if Vinyl Master software can't do this. So I am at a loss. Us there some special steps I must do in Illustrator? I have attempted various different saving methods but the text almost always disappears when opened in Vinyl Master no matter how I save it. Please help, I am ready to give up at this point if I can't even cut extremely basic designs with this cutter and software.