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Fre/Trial Software help Need ASAP!
Hi all, am an IT Technician at a highschool in Blackpool, and we have a Roland Camm1 CX-24 machine, and ive made a few general text base stickers previously, but i went today to create some from JPEG, noticed it doesn’t import JPEG images, so i opened up adobe illustrator and i exported my file as a WMF and also tried an EMF.
opened up the program the use in D&T called TechSoft 2D Design V1, now there v2 allows you to import JPEG images, but V1 doesn’t hence the conversion.
Anyway i went to import it, it came up with an option box to scale etc, i click ok but nothing shows up, ive tried loads of diff rent format and Ive also tried diff rent PC’s and reinstalled the software 3 times.
Now I’m wondering if theres a free piece of software or a trial i could use which allows me to Print/Cut/plot (not sure on the terminology) a JPEG design.
like mentioned using a Roland Camm 1 CX-24, with TechSoft 2D Design V1.
mod-edit see board rules
If the program prints fine and cuts perfect and does this i will get the school to go ahead and purchase it.
Thanks, hope you got enough info to help me
SimonP.S Sorry for a lengthy first post!
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10 Replies
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Simon
Jpegs cannot be used you must used vector images created in the likes of illustrator or coreldraw. So you will need to redraw it in illustrator,depending on the version of illustrator you have there is a tool called live trace which will do it for you but the results aren’t always the best.Hope this helps
Dave
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Hi David,
have illustrator CS3, is there a tutorial on how to do this anywhere? And is that the reason there not importing?
Once i run say live trace, how will i then convert it to and save it as a vector?
Thanks
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once you have the image in cs3 you just hit the live trace button you can play with the settings to get a better result. Then just save as an .ai or .eps and that should be it.
Dave
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OK can;t find the live trace button, but will google that shortly, and secondly the program 2D Design doesn’t import .ai or .eps files, hence another program is needed to work with the Roland CX-24
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I haven’t used the cx-24 but you might be able to run it from illustrator as that’s how i run my cutter.
Dave
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As in just go to File>Print instead of File>plot, and I’m able to do it that way? Does it then matter about the graphics? Weather its vector, or not
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You can’t plot bitmap formats, such as JPG or TIFF. The file has to
be vector format, as this is the format that the plotter driver understands.
It’s similar to Postscript, in that points are described mathematically, and
joined together by straight or curved lines. Bitmap formats are pixels, and
need converting to vector, although this is not always possible. -
Sorry for being so dumb guys, but learning alot 😉
So i need to get the images i have to vector? What file extension is a vector image? Or the best way of converting them, i did this live trace thing didn’t exactly do anything if you ask me?
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It really depends on what you are trying to achieve. If it is a photo type
image, this isn’t really suitable for vectorising. Type some text and convert
it to outline. That is a vector image. If you hit keystroke ‘Command Y’, you
will see the outline of the text. This is the path that the plotter will follow.
You will usually find that vector files have the ‘.ai’ or ‘.eps’ extension, but this
this is an indicator of the software used to create the file, and doesn’t
necessarily mean that the data contained within will be in vector format.
An example of this is placing a JPG in an Illustrator file, and saving as an
EPS does not make the JPG a vector file. It is important to understand the
difference between file types. I would suggest something along the lines of
Googling ‘difference between vector and bitmap files’, or similar.Cheers,
Jamie. -
Cheers mate started playing with illustrator alot last night, and i managed to get convert the file i wanted to WMF, but i had to trace around it manually, in illustrator, i then exported it as a wmf, and then imported it into 2D Design, this then seamed to work, haven’t tried plotting as of yet, thanks all for your help!
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