haumana

I'm curious - have you tried to rotate it 180-degrees and see if it comes up with the same problem; or resize down for testing purposes and see if it still has that issue.

Is 22" the short side? If so, then turn the sensors off and do your best to not go off vinyl, because that would very, very bad - you will end up cutting into the cutting strip, and chances are the carriage will get stuck on the edge of the vinyl. If 22" is the longest side, then rotate your design. Position the pinch rollers to the very outer edges of the allowed area, and you can also set it to extend 0.4" in excess of the roller.

so is the issue the logo and additional lines cutting through it? or the cutter perceiving the vinyl to be narrower than it is? how large is the logo you are trying to cut? what software are you using to cut?

your top photo shows that the red and black lines are overlapping, so yes, if you send both colors to cut, the cutter will cut it how it's laid out - overlaps and all.

Super Score!!

definitely go with matte.

Kudos for trying to trace! I have to admit that I'm an absolute "short cut" kind of person, and am always perpetually grateful for Inkscape I think tracing your own artwork is very admirable. I, on the other hand, have zero creativity and have to rely on others - thank goodness I'm surround by a bunch of right-brainers! Anything original, that's done on old school paper is awesome! I have done my fair share of tracing (what Inkscape isn't able to vecotrize for me), and I kind of suck at it, but at some point, I get tired of tweaking the nodes and just send it to cut to see how good (or bad) it looks. Many of the custom hand-sketched stuff comes out decent, and the results may not be perfect, but the customer is usually just super stoked to see their creation turn into something they will undoubtedly end up plastering everywhere they possibly can. If they complain, I will generally spend more time to clean it up and smooth it out, but most times, they're just grateful that they found someone to do it in the first place. Let me justify the "less than perfect" results by saying that most times it's for family, friends, and/or friends of friends, and I do preface it with, "it's just a rough cut, and it can be smoothed out," and let them decide whether they want to chase down that rabbit hole to pay me for more tweaking time. I will generally provide a few sample at no cost because a lot of times, I do it in my spare time and cutting is not my 'day job.' If it's a company/corporate gig, then yes, I will spend copious amounts of time editing if necessary, and a proof goes out for final approval before I go into mass production. Pat yourself on the back, because I wouldn't have put forth the effort that you did to create original artwork! (seriously!)

I've seen it done before. They're called Hackintosh. I have attempted to do it on one of my netbooks, but then reinstalled Win because it was too hard to navigate Mac on such a tiny screen. There are some write-ups on the internet as to which make/model of PCs are compatible and what type of mods you need to make to get them to be a fully functional Mac. A lot of times, it's just adding in an aftermarket WiFi if you're not going to hard wire it to the web. I swapped out my MacBook Pro to an SSD. Wicked fast! Love it!!

Now my rig is just a glorified email station. Hahaha. I cut over and setup my Mac when my last PC bit the dust. I was tired of replacing the HDs and/or entire box every few years. I bit the dust and forked a lot of dough for the Mac. Then again, at that time I was deeper in web design, and some light video editing - it was easier for me to use Macromedia and Adobe Suites with Mac. I have to say that I do not regret it, and have been running this setup for almost 10-years and it's still going strong. I've done a few upgrades here and there - like when I had to replace the OS HD, I swapped it out with an SSD so not it boots fairly quickly. I love that since convincing a lot of my customers to go Mac, there are less service calls I need to do. Basically I'm putting myself out of business, since I do mostly computer software/hardware, desktop/laptop, PC/Mac stuff. Oh well, more time to read!

You must be a wicked fast weeder!

If you put a color and your setup is sensitive enough, it will try to print whatever shade of white it thinks it sees. If your material is white and just want that to show through, then you need to set those parts of your design to be transparent.

Mac? Did someone say Mac? Hahaha. You first need to determine how to you want to run your Windows on the Mac - As a stand alone, Mac or Win; or to just fire up Windows while keeping all the Mac stuff functional. My cutting software of choice is SBE, so that's the environment I cut from. I also run a version of Quicken that Intuit will never release for Mac, Inkscape (because even though it will run on Mac, PC does it way easier), and some other software I use to print on CD/DVDs and PVC ID Cards. So I do get my use out of the Windows side too. Bootcamp is free, and is already in OSX, just a matter of deciding how to partition to make room for windows. You can choose which environment to boot up when you fire up the computer - Mac or Win. I had someone who absolutely struggled with Mac, so I setup Win via Bootcamp, and then designated that to the primary partition to start up. She was the only one in a government agency that had a Mac laptop running exclusively on Windows Another option is VMware Fusion or Parallels. It's not free, but well worth the money if you need to run Windows within the Mac environment. I do it often, and it does it very, very well. I currently run a MacPro Tower, with 2 quad cores, what RAM I could afford when I configured the machine, and 4 HD's. The first is dedicated to OS, the second is dedicated with running my windows via Parallels, and the 3rd and 4th are strictly data storage. If you have any other questions, ask - hopefully I can help.

Which software are you looking to use with your cutter? If you're talking about using your existing cutter, but trying to cut with Sign Blazer, then you need to select a cutter in the SB software (Cutter > Setup) If you're talking about using a Graphtec cutter with their software - it's basically all inclusive. You can download their design/cutting software when you get their cutter. There is also plugins that Graphtec has that will allow to cut directly from some other design software - I don't know what they are from the top of my head, because I still use SB with my Graphtec.

My bad if I caused confusion. I said if you use standard type of vector file - .eps, .svg, etc. then that type of file is cross platform.

i believe SB will also do .svg files as well (although I stick with the .eps type). As long as you stick with a standard type of file (ie. .eps, .svg, .ai, etc.) many cutter software will be able to pick it up (import). That way, you can use it across several different programs and it's also cross platform (PC & Mac).