MAC’s and Sign’s

[Lorraine Buchan]

Hi Dan,

Welcome to the site, I think as your a Illustrator user this could be the ideal thing for you: http://www.magisign.com/

[John Childs]

Dan,

Rather than use you main Mac you might consider getting another one purely to drive your cutter. It doesn’t have to be expensive because cutting is such a simple job that practically any old Mac less than about ten years old will be more than adequate, and available at very low cost. So little processing power is required that I could probably wire my fridge up to do it.

You can then run this on OS7, 8 or 9 and use Cutline (www.illom.se) to drive your cutter leaving your main Mac free to use OSX for the clever stuff. Connecting the two Macs would be simple and cheap, needing only an ethernet crossover cable.

I am using this setup with one design computer, a G4DP running OS10.3 connected to two cutting stations using the original iMacs on OS9.[/i]

[Dan Butler]

Thanks All

MagiSign certainly does sound like the thing but at the moment I can’t get the demo to work…

I would say however that the technical guys at MagiSign have been most helpful and are keen to get it working. I’d recomend them for their customer support. High praise for a product that I can’t get to work!

Thanks again,

Dan

[Nicola McIntosh]

downloaded the cutline as john suggested, but i could not get it to open on my mac 😳 i actually downloaded the file from a pc! would this have made a difference? oh and the mac ops is 9.1 if that helps!!

any suggestions from all the mac users? 😆 😆

thanks Nik

[Aitor Asencor]

You can’t d/l Cutline demo from their site as it’s not available as a demo program, only a quicktime demo.

[Nicola McIntosh]

thanks aitor

macs chew my head up sometimes!!

Nik

[John Childs]

I’m the opposite nik. I can handle pretty much anything on a Mac but the only PC I own, which was forced on me to be able to get satellite broadband, gives me endless bother. I dare not switch it off in case I can’t get it running again. 😀

Back to Cutline…

The beauty of it is that it is simple to operate. This doesn’t matter so much if you are the only operator but if you try to train employees, some of whom may not be the brightest things to crawl out of the sea, you will get them working much quicker and have much less material wastage with an easy programme.

Also, as a stand-alone programme you do not need a copy of Illustrator on every machine, just the ones you design on.

Also, running like I do, the system is scaleable. If I need a new cutting station I just get a cheap Mac, install Cutline, plug it into the network and cutter and away we go.

[Mike Antrum]

Hi,

I’d consider Flexi-Cut.

It only costs £ 199.00 + VAT and is the entry level for the flexi-sign range. As such you can upgrade to bigger and better versions in the future if you need to.

Not available for OSX at the moment though 😥

Happy Cutting

Mike

[John Childs]

Mike….

I tried FlexiCut. Much too fiddly. It lasted a week before it went back into its box. 🙁

[Nicola McIntosh]

thanks john for your reply, i have the cutline floppy ready to try out tomorrow, just had another thought, my pc runs signlab and uses the parallel port to cut, would it be possible to run the mac but use the serial port? so both are ready to cut (not at the same time) to save changing cables? hope that made sense!!

Nik

[Dan Butler]

The MagiSign demo now works – download it and have a look for yourselves. Any troubles send an email to the support team – they are second to none!

Happy Cutting

Dan

[John Childs]

Nik,

I think you are asking whether you can have both your pc connected via parallel and your mac connected via serial at the same time.

Sorry, but I don’t know. It may be that there is some form of input sensing and that one will disable the other. If it would be advantageous to you I’d ring the cutter manufacturer and ask them. I would hesitate to recommend it but if they can’t give a definitive answer I would be inclined to plug it in and try it.

Best of luck.

[Nicola McIntosh]

yes i thought so too john! i will try it and see what happens, phoned roland
but got nowhere.

thanks anyway will keep on trying 😛 😛

Nik

[Mike Antrum]

Hi Nik,

When you turn on a Roland cutter it senses which port is connected and disables the other. If both are connected it will pick one and disable the other (can’t remeber if serial or parallel gets the priority !) However, there is a work around:

There are 2 ways you can do this

1) You could get a cheap serial switch box and wire them both up via serial, and all you would need to do is flick between them (unless you got an auto sensing switch box, in which case you need do nothing).

or

2) Roland plotters have a setting in their menus called I/O. It has 3 options: Serial Parallel & Auto. If you set it to auto, the machine will sense which one to use, and disable the other port. But if you select Parallel or Serial, you can pick which one to use.

Hope this helps,

Mike

[Freddy.Tait]

sorry correcting url
http://www.typestyler.com
click on tutorial list

[Freddy.Tait]

hi list users
i wonder if any of the list has tried typestyler software
it has a multitude of uses for grapics signs etc
export in illustrator , jpeg , pict, etc etc
its worth a look
all the best freddy at e.c.p.

(also coming soon for OSX so it says)

http://www.typestyler.com

on the first page click on tutorial its a PDF