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can anyone help/advise with a roland cutter please?
I am a Graphic Designer who is new in the sign cutting world and have only been using Roland cutters for 2 years. I recently purchased an older Roland Camm-1 CM24 (which works great) and it came with SignMate Elite. I have a MacBook Pro which has all of the Adobe Creative Suite programs on it. I typically design logos in Illustrator. My cutter is running off of a Dell computer. The last company I worked for used Flexi 8 and I know it accepts Illustrator documents. I can’t seem to figure out how to get my Illustrator documents into SignMate Elite. Is there a way to do it? Or… Do I need to get another program? If so what would be the best program for the cheapest amount of money? I am still going to use Illustrator to create my logo’s, and so many of my existing logos were created using this program. All I need the program to do is accept vector graphics and send them to the cutter. Am I missing a simple step… maybe linking my MacBook Pro to my cutter??? Any advise would be great!!! Thanks!
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8 Replies
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Hi Renee, welcome.
Don’t know of signmate elite or Macbook pro but most, if not all sign making software will allow import of EPS / wmf files from design software… so export from Illustrator as EPS or AI and import into Elite… that should do it.
Apologies if I have got wrong idea of your question / problem though.
Ian :lol1:
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As Ian says there should be an import facility
Import as eps or aiJohn Childs works in mac and illustrator
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We use CS3 on mac and have to save the files out of illustrator as version 3 files to get them in to flexi8. If saved any higher they do not open or open with errors.
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I don’t know what SignMate Elite is, but why do you need it at all?
Just download the driver from the Roland site and cut direct from Illustrator.
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Thank you all so much!!!! The eps has never worked, but the wmf worked. I hadn’t tried that before. I am so excited I finally got it cutting graphics. I should have joined this forum months ago. I’ll have to try saving the Illustrator document down to a 3 too. It always gives me an error when I try to import Illustrator/eps documents.
John…
You lost me on downloading the drivers. How do I do that? Would I need to hook the cutter directly up to my MacBook?? The printer cables don’t fit… are there adaptors. I really don’t know much about the cutters. -
Hi Renee.
Cutter manufacturers usually have an Illustrator plug-in to drive their machines. This is usually included on the disc which comes with the cutter, but are generally also available on their website.
If you download the one for your cutter, and copy it into the plug-ins folder of Illustrator, then re-start, you should be good to go.
I’m not sure about Roland specifically, but these things generally come as a control panel, which you access from the "Window" drop down menu of Illustrator. In there you can specify the size, orientation and all the other guff you need to cut your file.
Yes, you will need to drive the Roland from your Mac. If the CM24 has a USB connection then it should just be plug and play. If a serial connection you will need a cheap USB/serial adaptor, like the ones manufactured by Kingston.
Sorry I can’t be more specific because I’m not familiar with your cutter, but the Illustrator plug-in route is the way we cut vinyl here.
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Thanks John. I’ll have to play around with it. Appreciate all of your help.
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Hi Renee, following on from Johns advice you’ll find an Illustrator plug-in here. Scroll down around 3/4 of the way and you should find it.
Neil
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