webbhead
04-12-2004, 04:31 AM
Just thought I'd drop a few notes here, in case another newbie runs into these situations with Corel.
I couldn't figure out why my text was generating excessive z movements on my first sign (my logo- created in Draw11). The Bot was plunging repetitively on the interior of the apex's of the second W & other letters in Webb Woodworks (http://www.webbwoodworks.com/images/www_logo.gif). Turns out that for text characters with holes/negative spaces such "O"'s, you don't need to use Trim to cut the center out from the letter. Instead, all you need to do is select all text, convert to curves, & break apart curves for "holed" letters. This will generate 2 separate paths- interior & exterior for "holed" letters. Then save as Illustrator file (AI).
I noted that AI saved cleaner than DXF (as I read on the forum last week). DXF (v10) dropped a few vertices, & I had to add a few vertices to anchor some stray splines. Not so with AI - it came clean as is- a direct representation of the Draw file.
Anyway, if you don't break apart curves for "holed" letters & then save as AI, you'll note the "holed" letters get split into left & right halves. Once I did these things the toolpaths in Part Wizard cleaned right up, dropping the extra plunge movements.
Also, in Part Wizard, be sure to close your shapes for the "holes" in the letters. For some reason they weren't closed by default, & when I selected "inside" for my toolpath, it just generated a tiny little blurb path at the upper left of each hole. Once I closed these shapes... blam-o, a clean "inside" path was created for each hole. I'm really quite stoked, cuz this was driving me nuts every night after the day job for the last 3 days. Hope this helps someone...
I couldn't figure out why my text was generating excessive z movements on my first sign (my logo- created in Draw11). The Bot was plunging repetitively on the interior of the apex's of the second W & other letters in Webb Woodworks (http://www.webbwoodworks.com/images/www_logo.gif). Turns out that for text characters with holes/negative spaces such "O"'s, you don't need to use Trim to cut the center out from the letter. Instead, all you need to do is select all text, convert to curves, & break apart curves for "holed" letters. This will generate 2 separate paths- interior & exterior for "holed" letters. Then save as Illustrator file (AI).
I noted that AI saved cleaner than DXF (as I read on the forum last week). DXF (v10) dropped a few vertices, & I had to add a few vertices to anchor some stray splines. Not so with AI - it came clean as is- a direct representation of the Draw file.
Anyway, if you don't break apart curves for "holed" letters & then save as AI, you'll note the "holed" letters get split into left & right halves. Once I did these things the toolpaths in Part Wizard cleaned right up, dropping the extra plunge movements.
Also, in Part Wizard, be sure to close your shapes for the "holes" in the letters. For some reason they weren't closed by default, & when I selected "inside" for my toolpath, it just generated a tiny little blurb path at the upper left of each hole. Once I closed these shapes... blam-o, a clean "inside" path was created for each hole. I'm really quite stoked, cuz this was driving me nuts every night after the day job for the last 3 days. Hope this helps someone...