Howdy, all!
Can't say how much this forum has helped me get to this point. Two years of lurking, research, and saving my pennies. Thanks very much to all.
I just set up my "new" M-300, paired it with an old but perfectly serviceable laptop running XP, downloaded and installed what seem like perfectly good drivers from a site recommended in this forum, am running inkscape set up with correct color palette and page size, all with a paralell to paralell cable connected.
Created a simple hello world file - a 2" x 2" blue square, with a .003" black outline. Black is set to vector cut, blue is set to engrave at 20% power, and the colors are mapped correctly.
Challenge comes when I send the file to engrave - error after error, sometime the file will spool when the M -300 is shut down and restarted (seems to jump in before the spool times out)...
When I was able to get just an .003" outline version to spool, it treated it like a raster image. Rastered it correctly, at right size - but wanted to cut...
Then tried text. Many printer errors later, got it to take the file, and it produced text that was compressed in the y axis, and overlapped. I thought my alignment was off, but after many chex, determined that this ain't a hardware issue...
Have tried several printer setting options - mainly between "print directly to machine" and print spooling. Should be able to spool, but doesn't seem to like to...
Have the option of trying a serial to USB cable. Also have the option of plugging in a mac running cdr x3 under paralells, and dumping the inkscape option. Would like to leave the xp laptop connected...my wife likes having the mac at home...
any suggestions?
thanks, all!