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?
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.
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
Type some text using a script font, change your view to Wireframe, see how the font is out lines with the letters overlapping each other.
Now with the text selected hit Ctrl+Q on your keyboard you have now converted the text to plain vectors but still with the overlaps.
Final step is to hit Ctrl+W (Weld) and you will see the text converted to one cuttable object. Note you may have to hit the Weld command a couple of time to get everything to Weld.
If you are doing this a lot Johns Tip of assigning the W key to the Weld function is handy.
Good luck!
mandm said:in what property is text before welding?
Chris Wills said:Final step is to hit Ctrl+W (Weld)
Thanks. I'm following you. You outline how different programs require different characteristics of data to cut. What about when cutting directly from Corel?