What are the best practices for designing and outputting text to a vinyl cutter?
I am new to CorelDraw. Should text be converted to curves or contours prior to cutting? If so, what is the technical reason behind that?
In my case, I have been designing in CorelDraw using basic fonts and outputting to a roland printer/plotter. the only way I achieve success is by first converting the text to curves. Why?
Thank you for the responses. So that leaves me with the question: in what property is text before welding? What technically takes place during the welding or converting to curves or objects process? Can it be assumed that text, in its native state, is not vector based and contains no usable path information?
Mandm; John has a good idea, when you weld text if you have two letters touching it will make them one joined graphic so the cutter doesn't have the letters cutting into each other, and it converts that text to curves also. With a script if you didn't weld and smooth out the nodes at the join points it can look bad. I always duplicate any text that I want to cut and leave one copy as text incase I need to edit it later.
George
HI.
Text and fonts are always vector. Welding simply makes it a "curve" shape, as the program calls it. Where it was once a "text "shape and you could change fonts and properties alike, in a curve shape you can edit nodes and do different things related to curve shapes.
~John
mandm said:in what property is text before welding?
Chris Wills said:Final step is to hit Ctrl+W (Weld)