dcbevins

Hi guys. I have been poking around here a while, hopefully being helpful on occasion. My last "job," was working for a signage, screen printing, embroidery shop. They had 3 Roland vinyl cutters, 2-3 lamination devices, a few clamshell heat press's, a six station screen printing set up with a convection dryer, a 54' Roland print/cut Soljet, metal/plastic cutting machines to cut 4'x8' aluminium and coroplast blanks, a 12 head embroidery machine, (not sure the brand, but ancient as it took 3 1/4 floppies, a GelPrint sublimation printer, (the colors always were off.) They had two buildings, one with a a two port garage. They did many t-shirts via screen printing. In my opinion they undercharged as most were under $6.00 in orders over 50. They did the county and neighboring counties sports teams uniforms, (names & number,) and most of the booster organization's t-shirts. They did specialty "glitter" in cut vinyl and charged $15-30 a shirt for these. The teens gobbled them up. No rhinestones. There biggest gig was for a Fortune 500 coal mining company. The did all the warning/safety stickers for their equipment including reflective road signs, reflective warning and instructional decals, permit and inspection numbers, promotional material, ect. and so on. I mostly kept the Roland spitting out something. But that was then and this is now. Now I am trying solo from what was a car port but is now an enclosed office. Now I have a 50" uscutter vinyl cutter, (with what appears to be a completely dead laser pointer). A couple Epson WF 1100, one with just normal ink and one I am trying to get sublimation ink to flow through but it is being a stubborn bitch, and BITCH is the correct term. I have a 11.5" x 15" swing away heat press with mug and cap extensions. I have dreams of a roland 54' vsi. I have a small stock of Siserweed, Oracal 631, 651 and green star vinyl, blank rhinestone material with a small supply of stones and a few small samples of "glitter" vinly for heat transfer. Any advice about how to improve my range of services without a bank loan would be appreciated. BUT, my man question I was just wondering if you guys have tried fiverr, http://www.fiverr.com/ I am capable of doing artwork, but It is not my forte. I am good at taking existing art and hammering into something. I know my way around a node via CorelDRAW, (X7 paid subscription,) and sometimes Inkscape. I would like a pool of talent to tap into. Thus recently I tried fiverr. I picked two "artists" at random, though not exactly random as I was looking for cheap. Contrary to the cliche, fiverr can cost more than five dollars. I gave two different artists $10 each to make a vector version of the local high school's mascot and provide me with the vector files. One artist was from India, the other Serbia. Not sure that matters, it is interesting on some level. The first one sucked so bad I can't put it into words. The second one however made something I would be glad to place on a tshirt, a banner, or a bumper sticker. Have you guys tried this service? What is your experience?

OUCH!!!!

I guess it boils down to finding individuals, as it always does. I think i will offer the Serbian ten more bucks for a frontal view and see how he does as what he drew was a profile, and then maybe try a few more people. If I spend 100 bucks on 10 tries and I find two people that are worth working with it would be well worth it.

I want to say something Zen like such as every Journey begins with a single step. But instead I will just say welcome to the forum and think about an aspirin in case the Long Island Iced Teas don't agree with me.

I THINK the background color option in Inkscape is just to give contrast. It is not included if you export it as a bitmap and I don't think it is rendered when displayed if left as an svg. It is just there to help in cases such as drawing white images. It is nice to have a dark background to work against. It is also helpful if you are printing on colored paper or media. If you need the actual image to have a background just draw a rectangle the same size as your canvas. Align it to the center. Lock it in place to ease working. If you give it a fill of "none" then it gets saved as transparent if you export as a png.

There are addon packages for CorelDRAW and Illustrator. However it is possible to just get by with out using specialty software. Inkscape, CorelDRAW, and Illustrator are all capable of making templates. The addon packages just make it easier. Here are some techniques. https://forums.adobe.com/message/4125611

When I open it I see 8 objects grouped together. It is an odd placement. Here I colored each group I found a different color. You are going to have to break it apart to get down to individual letters. I am using CorelDRAW. Here is the eps with everything ungrouped, saved PS level 2. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34207516/land.eps What in the end do you want done to it?

I stuck my vector bookmarks up here: http://raindrop.io/collection/194167#0

There is a technique that I have seen in some specialty software that can vectorize an image using a single color such that is has a photo-realistic effect. This can be useful in some applications like engraving, etching, and cut vinyl. Here is an example of what I am talking about. Until recently I was just aware of commercial software able to vectorize in this manor. But today I have found ZebraTrace and have been experimenting. It is open source. It outputs SVG files that are vectors and not embedded bitmaps. It can be found at http://maxim-s-barabash.github.io/ZebraTrace/. A guy that is in the #inkscape chat room on freenode pointed it out to me. Just thought I'd let you guys know about it. It's a nice tool to have handy I think.

Starting with this file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34207516/mar.jpg I open with ZebraTRACE using File - Open Bitmap. I then go to File - Load Preset and select HorizontalLines.preset. You have to play with the Number of Curves, Minimum and Maximum width values. Then you get a marLINE output. hehe. Here is a screen shot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34207516/marline.png

Man that sucks. I hate that for you. I'm thinking a camera pointed right at the door and a BIG tv showing everyone walking in on Candid Camera.

A guy over on the t-shirt forums said "Check this picture of cut vinyl,, it weeds in about 3 seconds.. Its pretty amazing" and " to weed just grab a corner of the vinyl and weed as one piece,,Royster you can throw it on a shirt.." I'll get around to an experiment with it sooner or later. My thought it might be nice on a banner as a corner graphics.

I don't have one one of these, but I looked at one once as a potential gift. I think what I took from it was there is a regular version and a Silhoutte Studio Designer Edition. The one that costs more money has an SVG export. However I think i read something versions before 2.0 supported SVG export. They took it out to charge for the Designer Edition. But I don't know first hand. Maybe you got an earlier version on a CD? You could also try Inkscape's trace function. It's free, and I think at least as good if not better than Illustrator's trace function, at least for some images. I think that even thought it might involve a learning curve, switching tools for your designs might be a good idea and get rid of that spiteful program.

Maybe try Signcut Pro. It is not free. The trial is 7 days, though it will run in test mode after that period. In trial mode the dimensions are limited on your output. But if you just needs something to test that the hardware is sound, its worth a shot. A document on their website does lists the Seiki 870T: http://www.signcutpro.com/files/pdf/driverlist20130410.pdf I use Signcut Pro. It has few bells and whistles like Flexi or other more advanced packages. I just need it to drive the cutter and little else. I use CorelDraw X7 for the designs. It is subscription based. You need a web connection on the machine you will be using it on. A life time subscription is $398. A six month subscription is $64. http://www.signcutpro.com/webshop/ Good luck!

Try EPS Postscript Level 2 on your export and see if that helps. Not sure what the Rasterize filter effects may do in regards to cutting. It is probably the case you don't have any filter effects. Can Sign Blazer take .ai or .pdf. Maybe try that as export if so. I am not familiar with SignBlazer. But perhaps it has an option to show "Enhanced View" or some how set the dpi in the view settings someplace. It might just be that it is rendering it on screen poorly. I would be curious to see a posted eps file looked like.

One thing you could do is just take a picture of the vehicle with a yard stick in the picture. Then with some adjusting of screen dpi and what not draw a yard stick to size, import your photo, and scale the image up to the yard stick. This can work also for other things like store front windows and such. Taken from this forum, (not sure if you need to create an account to get in): http://community.coreldraw.com/forums/p/38796/183687.aspx#183687 Also relevant: http://community.coreldraw.com/forums/p/38796/221079.aspx#221079 They discuss a macro in coreldraw to accomplish this. But it can be done by hand. Also, this is a good commercial vehicle template collection: http://www.unleash.com/ddw/vehicle-templates/ They offer some freebies if you sign up.

ABORT ABORT ABORT

Just thought of something, Inkscape has options under preferences-Selector to change some of the Bounding Box behavior.

Just thought of something, Inkscape has options under preferences-Selector to change some of the Bounding Box behavior. Ignore that! Wrong post!

I haven't been to CA. I don't know about the look of the trees. But maybe you can find something here that is pleasing: http://all-silhouettes.com/vector-palms/ Like the good sir Mz SKEETER said, it isn't going to over work your cutter. Heck the thing is meant to work! Unleash the dogs of the cutter. I think I would clean up the lines in the CALI part though, that would ease the work the cutter was doing and I think look a bit nicer.

From CorelDraw seting width to Hairlline seems to work best for me using the freehand tool. Adding a hairline contour works if your trying to outline an object, that or the shaping tool Boundary. It sounds like you had a small rectangle instead of a line. That would account for it cutting twice. Some cutting software has the ability auto generate weedlines. Sometimes that works well, somtimes. Also some cutting software lets you preview the cut, giving you a little animation of how it is going to go beforehad.

Draws has a "Hide bounding box for curve tools" option. This is only for some of the drawing tools however, like the bezier tool, and not for all objects. For text frames there is a "show text frames" option. There is a general "treat as filled" option for the Pick tool in Draw. It is not removal of the bounding box, but rather helps sometimes when you have objects that are just outlines and it is difficult to select by clicking. It is in the options and also a button/icon. But overall, no, Draw can't disable the bounding box. I think I was aware Illustrator could do this but never used it. I will have to remember that when I am in Illustrator again.

Some more thoughts: Big comparison here: http://product.corel.com/help/CorelDRAW/540229932/Main/en/Documentation/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm#href=CorelDRAW-Comparing-tools.html&single=true I find I have to switch between the selection tools several times in Illustrator were in Draw the one Pick tool combines this functionality. I am not aware of an equivalent "crop" tool in Illustrator. Maybe one can use clipping and opacity masks. The crop tool can crop curves like it was a bitmap. The eraser tool is also handy in this vein. You could probably do this with shape tools or pathfinder tools. Illustrator has threaded text, to flow from one frame to another. In Draw you link paragraph text frames. What Illustrator lacks is going to the next page. It doesn't support multiple pages. Draw though is going to be bogged down if you try to flow text across hundred's of pages say for a book, but is fine for a newsletter or such. Draw and Illustrator has Color Management. I don't deal with this greatly and can't state the caveats well. Inkscape doesn't have Color Management. Draw supports up to 45.72 × 45.72 m artboard, and multiple pages. Illustrator supports a 5.7785 × 5.7785 m artboard and multiple artboards, (not exactly the same as pages.) Crazy side note: Inkscape supports a 304.8 × 304.8 km artboard, (yes I said KM as in "Dude what should we set the max to. Dude a million feet sounds awesome.",) A larger artboard is usefull when dealing with very large output, (like Billboard,) but with scaling any size shortcomings are not hard to overcome. Draw has a 45000% (estimated) max zoom factor. Illustrator has a 6400% max zoom factor. Inkscape has a 25600% max zoom factor. With the pick tool active, you can hold ALT down to dig. Digging lets you select objects behind other objects, sometimes even in grouped objects. I don't know how to "dig" in Illustrator. My experience is that Illustrator handles SVG import better. Draw has a annoying habit of crashing when you import a svg file and try to ungroup it. I try to use inkscape in those cases and pdf or eps export first. Conversely, Draw seems to export SVG better. Snapping seems better in Draw. At least I seem to fight with it in Illustrator. I love Draw's dynamic alignment. Draw has snap to guidelines, at some point Illustrator did not, but later versions might. There are alignment shortcuts in Draw I am married to. A divorce would be ugly. C E T B and P are great shortcuts that take several more steps in Illustrator. Note the dev release of Inkscape has similar shortcuts. Rounding rectangles is a simple short step in Draw. Fillet, Scallop & Chamfer are great tools. Node editing, (anchor points,) in Draw is just better, related to how the pick tool is all in one vs Illustrator needed different tools. I find Inkscape to be better than Illy at node/anchor point editing also. It might even be better than draw but I am not sure as I am not as practiced with it. Inkscpae as far as raw creation is certainly a heavy weight contender. Text kerning is more interactive in Draw, though Mac OS probably honors the original font design better, but that is an OS rendering thing. Here us a very old comparison: http://www.sketchpad.net/drawing10.htm

I hang on freenode in the #inkscape and ##design rooms sometimes, hehe.