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
Something else is handy to know, is if you add a shadow ( like with the Extrude tool ) I separate the extrude from the text and Weld the extruded part. and I'll either Trim the text to the extrude or use the node edit and dress up the extrude to make it the way I want the job to lay out after cutting. ( CorelDRAW doesn't do the best job with extrudes, but it is usable most of the time
.)
I hope this will be some Help.