PDF & Cut Path

[Steven Griffiths]

Hi. Have you tries Welding and all that?

[Paul Goodwin]

Yep 🙁

I can get it into corel, but the image looks terrible around the shading, compared to the pdf.

i can print the pdf if i open it straight into troop no probs but i need that cutpath

[Chris Wool]

i have in the past when a pdf got the better of me was to open in photoshop save as a high quality image then in to corel. it does the job but may not be the answer

chris

[Paul Goodwin]

Thats what i did Peter but the shading on the outline imports in as lines and looks terrible 🙁

[Kevin.Beck]

you should be able to manually create a path around the image, then use that image to create a cut path, the delete the shape to leave the cut path and the image to be printed.

[Paul Goodwin]

I can do that Becky.

But i cant put the cut path i have made in with the pdf file.

as soon as i try and open up the pdf in anything apart from adobe acrobat it looks cak 🙁

Troop DX can do it 🙂 but i can’t inport that into anything that i have to use it 🙁

I WILL FIND AWAY

[L J.]

Stick at it Paul, why should you be the only one who keeps his hair.
L J

[David Rowland]

not sure on how Troop system operates but i guess your cutter software is a plugin in corel.

Best bet is to draw a line around what you have then cut out of corel.

To get Corel to “Contour” a cut line around your entire image is tricky. In finecut within corel, they gave an extra button to find the outside edge but in standard corel you need to fine the outer layer and then offset (contour) off it and there is no other way to do it.

If colours are bothering you, then Corel does sometimes adjust colours, the PDF import on corel is quite unique and is normally fairly good with colour, it is however not 100% accurate.

if you are really concerned and need a last ditched effort then do this:-

You need either Adobe Acrobat Pro (not reader) or Adobe Photoshop.

Acrboat route:
1: Load the PDF into Adobe Acrobat Pro and Save as an EPS, hopefully the settings are left as “Leave colour unchanged”. If offered use Postscript Level 2.

2: Import into Corel Draw and try Postscript Interpreted option, if results are bad then try the next option.
2a: Import into Corel as EPS (ecapsulated Postscript). (NOT the illustrator EPS) and you will have pixelled image.

3: Draw the cutting line you need, sorry cant help too much on this but if the cut software works by colour, then make the outline colour something crazy like purple.

4: Pick your outline up and “Arrange / Send it to the Back”. This will place the cut line behind the image.

5: Export your image “Selected ONLY” and use EPS settings. These might need to be on Postscript Level 2 also.

6: Hopefully you will have your image with a cutline hidden.

7: Print (with marks?)

8: Cut (on the marks?)

Photoshop route:
1: Loads the PDF (rasterise) into photoshop matching the resolution to quarter/half/full dpi (360/540/720dpi?). Save as a bitmap format like native Photoshop format or even PDF format.

2: Once in photoshop and pixelled, you may have a white scrap area, use magic wand to find this, Click Paths rollup and “Use selection as path” botton and then “Save Selection”

3: Export “Paths as Illustrator”, this will export the cutting path into a AI file.

4: In corel, load the Photoshop file and the AI paths file (you may need to assign a Outline colour to it), place the two items into place and then carry on with Number 4 above.

Hope that helps as i don’t have a Troop but understand printing/sign software in quite some depth. All the best
Dave

[Paul Goodwin]

Thanks Dave i’ll give that a shot in teh morning

Paul

[Peter Normington]

Jesus s Christ that sound complicated!!!
And to say we aint got the skills of traditional painters!

[Rod Gray]

Yeah Peter this is one of the probelms Mort and i discovered between our 2 versions of Troop.

Troop DX takes in a PDF and literally within seconds your cutpath is on it and it`s printing.

Troop V5 can`t even open it. I just can`t understand why software which is supposed to be a newer version, can`t open files the older version can.

Very frustrating.

[Paul Goodwin]

Rod it can open it, but thats as far as it goes.

and do i want to cut out by hand 120 400mm circles??

[Rodney Gold]

If you can save as an EPS you most likely have the full version of Acrobat so can export the image as a JPG, so import pdf in vector mode into Corel to get your cutpaths , delete everything barring the cutpath , export the PDF as a JPG and bring that in and line the 2 up (you will see there are settings enabling you to get high resolution etc if you “extract images as JPEG” so you can get a pretty good JPEG out of it)
Barring that if you dont have a full version of Acrobat , you could try a 2 pass print , IE print the PDf without cutting but using cropmarks , read the cropmarks and send a cut only file from Corel after. We often do that to correct uncut decals or partially cut decals if our print and cut bombs out or decals arent cut right thru etc

[David Rowland]

it really was a last diched effort but it depends on your knowledge of software, the DX version sounds pretty good if it will take any PDF and find it’s outer graphics and then create a cut line, that would be a very useful feature.

The way I see it, if we employ people with Corel Draw experience then they are more likely to create the job with cut lines, trying to find people with SignLab/DX/Omega knowledge limits the design skill to those programs, so we are corel based and thefore the RIP software doesn’t really need to be complicated, if it RIPs and the Prints then that is better for us as there is no 3rd party editiors involved which could change colours, badly decode etc. We use AIT’s shiraz RIP and that does have it’s limits but it does produce very close to pantone colours and prints like a dream.

Also on PDF’s, Acrobat version 7 is now out which means another PDF revision, our editing software is now limited to upgrading or buying upgrades so I suspect some PDF’s can be imported but not all. The so-called portable PDF format is now becoming a bit costly.

[Paul Goodwin]

Cheers Rodney will try that 🙂

[Paul Goodwin]

Hi Guys

Cracke dit with all your help thank you 🙂

i saved as a eps ( i did do thi sthe other day but didn’t play with teh settings )

opened in corel and noticed that the shading had gone, but as it was a vector filer i could moved the layers about and i got the shading back 🙂

put my cut path around saved as eps, it prints loverley 🙂

Thanks again all