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Creating DXF’s from illustrator
Hi there,
I am using adobe illustrator to design shapes, letters and numbers of different sizes and getting them cut up by a friend with a laser cutter. However, when he opens the dxf on his laser cutter sometimes the internal ring of the 0’s are gone and he needs to manually add vectors and scale accordingly.
This mainly happens on just 0’s. However, it has now started occuring on 5’s every now and then. I’m not sure why the dxf’s are this inconsistent and was wondering if anybody have any good tips on creating a dxf file from illutrator with minimal issues!
Thanks,
Carl. -
7 Replies
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My only suggestion is to make sure you convert any fonts to curves before creating the DXF file
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Make sure everything is expanded and converted lines.
Make sure everything is un grouped.
Autocad version R13 selected
PNG File format selected
Maximum editability selected
Outline text selected.
This is what I do in cs3 to open in Lasercut 5.3 to work on my HPC laser.
Hope that sorts it for ya!
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Perfect thanks for the replies.
I was wondering if Adobe Illustrator has a nesting tool? ideally I would like AI to automatically nest lots of different shapes / letters etc into a specific area in order to get the most yield from my material when laser cutting.
Currently I am manually moving every shape / letter / number and it get a bit tedious!
Any help would be great.
Thanks,
Carl. -
Illustrator is unlikely to have any features like that, it’s predominantly a design program but I’ve found the best tool for nesting material is generally the one sat staring at the screen. I’ve been trying to find shortcuts for all the tedious parts of the job for years but not had much luck so far
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I know you can get plugins to do nesting etc. I’ve not bothered with any as yet.
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eCut may do what you require. It’s an Illustrator plugin, which can be used to nest shapes in a given area.
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Brilliant thanks for the comments. I’ll have a look at whats been suggested!
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