Corel pattern or Mercury driver problem

[Jerry Allen]

I just ran into a problem today with Corel 12 and my Mercury when using a pattern fill. Previously I had used pattern fills on the edges of bowls with great results.
They were all filled straight, or linear circular designs around the edge of the bowl.
Since it looked so good I decided to attempt engraving a rifle stock which was fortunately mine and a cheap old K-mart 22. I should have done a trial on some scrap stock first, but did not.

Two problems occured (see photo below):
1) When filling an irregular polygon with a stock bitmap Corel Draw pattern, The pattern failed to stay within the boundry of the object and formed a rectangular pattern. In the photo, the pattern should be inside of the boundry which is for the handle of a rifle stock.
2) After a couple of failures and fiddling with some test plots, I attempted to fill an object with one of the stock PostScript patterns. for the most part the pattern stayed within the object boundries, but the finer lines only printed occasionally and at times plotted outside the object's boundry, although not as bad as in problem 1). You have to look closely to see what I'm talking about.

When doing a preview before plotting, everything looks fine, so I initially figured it must be the GCC driver. But really I have no idea what is causing the problem.

Any info/help would be appreciated.

[Rodne Gold]

Could be the driver , see if there are any new ones at laserprousa. Try converting the filled area to a bitmap and laser the bitmap.

[Matty McQuilkin]

I also have a mercury and it has always been a pain with Corel all versions.

Tried upgrading firmware and drivers. I always do a test on scrap cardboard saves a lot of wasted stock.

If you convert all your Corel files to a Bitmap before sending to the laser you should not have a problem.

Vector lines in Corel 12 have been a pain also. using hair line wont work 90% of the time with the mercury driver. But if you physically change the hairline to 0.003 it works every time.

Matty

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Jerry;
Weird- tried the same thing on my Mercury unit and got the same results- not that I doubted you but I'm never surprised what can happen.
Tried it with various objects and noticed that the width of the output is the max width of the object-seems to ignore the actual shape of the object.
I did a fill on a polygon (7 sides), saved it as a bitmap and reimported it-engraved fine.
I have driver 3.42 and firmware 2.20-02.
As a side note, my number one fault is a confidence, based on almost 2 years experience, that I have the proper settings and don't need to test on a scrap piece- do it all the time and suffer the consequences most often than not.
Would be interested to hear if someone using Corel 12 with a different laser has the same problem.
George

[George M. Perzel]

Matt;
Forgot to mention that Corel 12 seems to accept the "hairline" setting for a vector-never had a problem with it since someone mentioned that it works on 12. As you said, had to manually set the dimension to .003 or less for it to work on previous Corel versions.
George

[Jerry Allen]

Thanks for the suggestions folks. Sounds reasonable. The only thing is that when I convert vector art to bitmap it looks noticably worse on screen. It may be that I'm looking too closely and that it will actually print as well as vector art. I'll give it a try.

I use a couple of different drafting programs. Some of them have settings for the printer and especially plotter drivers that enable/disable "hardware fill". I'm tending to think that there may be a hardware fill going on with no means to disable it. The graphics print and show correctly in the preview window in Corel, so I don't think it is a Corel output problem.
Regarding revs, my firmware is 2.24_01 and the driver is 3.42. I read somewhere that Pinnacles shouldn't use the Laserpro driver. Maybe that is no longer true. Perhaps Kevin could clarify that for us.

Regarding vector cutting, hairlines and Corel 12, I have never had a problem with the hairline setting either.

[Jerry Allen]

I just found a couple of settings in Corel that do the trick:
1) in the Print dialog box, Misc tab, there is a checkbox for "Rasterize entire page" with an accompanying rez setting.
2) under the Tools menu, Options, Global, Printing/Driver Compatabilty, there is a setting "Use software clipping for fills". I can't find any description for this in Help, so I'll just have to give it a try.

PS-results
I just ran again with the two settings above set exclusively in each of two runs.
All problems ceased on both runs.
The "rasterize entire page" seemed to work the best. The deepest grooves were slightly cleaner.
The "Use software clipping for fills" also worked but handled the Postscipt fills differently in that it cut the rasters and then went back and cut vector lines finishing off the fine lines in the pattern and re-cutting the edges of the squares between the weave. It therefore took longer on the Postscript fill objects and did not look any better. The clip for fills function worked the same as rasterizing on the irregular object with the bitmap fill. The clip setting becomes associated permanently with the specific printer driver and so if set would not have allowed my initial screwup. However, the rasterize function, even though it needs to be set each session, has the advantage of allowing the setting of the raster resolution which seems to be best if matched with the laser's resolution setting.
Both settings can be useful depending on the job.

[Mike Mackenzie]

We have not had this problem with any version of corel however there is something you can do in corel they have something called powercliping where you can take an image and clip it into a shape.

you will find it in the effects menu Just select the pattern then choose place into container and select your shape it work give it a try.

[Roy Brewer]

Jerry,


FWIW, no issues like this with any version of Corel to Epilog lasers. I use the PS fills (for effects exactly like yours) on a regular basis without issue.

I must say some great troubleshooting on your part to find a work around!

[Jerry Allen]

Thanks Roy.
I just wish I had tested first, but I never had a problem before with linear rectangles and it didn't occur to me that circles or irregular objects would screw up.

I am familiar with Power Clip and have not had a problem with it, although once the center part of the design screwed up for no apparent reason. The problem is with the PS and bitmap fills. Power Clip is not intended for fills with the fill tool. As I mentioned before, some plotters have a hardware fill and hardware circles function and generally it is turned off. The print driver passes the pattern to the plotter driver. That's just my guess. I'm guessing that's the intent of the "software clip" function in the Corel printer options. In any case it works.

If you guys aren't having a problem then it very well may be the driver and I hope Kevin Huffman picks up on this thread. The fixes mentioned should at least be included in the manual.

[Alan Young]

Has anyone here had any problems with power loss if using the ramp function when vector cutting? I am using driver 3.44 and firmware 2.24_01

alan

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Alan;
Need a little more info. What are you cutting and how does power loss show up? Is it on all parts of the table? What mode are you cutting in and what are your power, speed, dpi and ppi settings? Thanks
George M. Perzel

[Alan Young]

The problem is on all parts of the table. It does not seem to matter what the settings are. I can be cutting a job and all of a sudden it looses power and will only score a line. I can reproduce the power loss by using the ramp function in the driver. I have reinstalled the driver, installed a new system board and had the laser tube checked out, but I still have the problem. I have had excellent support from the dealer and have no complaints with them but I feel that it has us both stumped. It also makes a squeaking noise when it goes into this mode, hard to describe, kind of like rubbing nylon swishy pants together.

GCC sent me the latest Firmware/driver to use. I tried a little experiment; I took a piece of Card stock paper and drew up a series of strait vector lines to cut. Then I set the power to 100% speed and 20% power. Normally this would cut the card stock. I set the line color to black and hairline line weight and turned on the ramp function. All I got was a very faint score line. I then ran the same job again this time increasing the power 10% each time all the way up to 100% power, still only score lines not even enough to cut through the paper going over the same lines. Ok I thought got some thing here at least I can reproduce it. So I decided to quit messing around and get some work done so I sent another real job this time with out the ramp function and it started out same way, no power, then about 15 seconds into the job, bam, the laser powers back to normal and it is cutting fine. I can live without the ramp function if it is not going to work. The frustrating problem is this suddenly happens in the middle of a job and usually I have to turn off and back on the machine to get it to return to normal. The other thing that tends to bother me is it should work. Can anyone else using the Mercury 30 watt laser reproduce this?

I have replaced the main circuit board, sent the tube in and it checkout fine. I have the current firmware and driver. It also did this with the previous driver version.
On another note the display panel does not change out of the ordinary. In other words it seems to recognize and display any power or speed setting changes sent to it.



Alan

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Alan;
I have a Mercury 60 watt unit-should be the same as yours but higher power tube.
I tried your card stock experiment and settings and got no cutting at all when ramp function is enabled in driver and P=20, S=100. Saw a very very faint line at that setting. Increased power in steps up to 100 and still could not get cut thru until I decreased speed to 80 with P=100.
Ran the same test with ramp off and had cut thru at your original setting of P=20, S=100.
I'm running same driver as you but with 2.20-02 firmware. The test I ran was cutting a square, ellipse, and rounded corner rectangle-all in a row.
I was told by my LaserPro rep that the ramp function was used in vector cutting to slow the speed of the cut when going around curves.
I then ran test on wood veneer, something I do quite a bit of, and cut same patterns at P=100, S=70 with ramp ON (my normal setting for cutting this particular veneer)-all OK
I then turned Ramp OFF and ran the same test-WEIRD thing happened. The square did not cut at all and the ellipse and rd corner rectangle cut thru with obviously too much power!
I repeated the last cut and everything cut thru but with too much power.
I ran the two tests again and same thing happened, square would not cut with Ramp off after running test with Ramp on until I made a second pass!

I will continue fooling around but one thing is clear-power with ramp ON is significantly reduced from that with Ramp OFF and I can't explain the failure to cut the square .
I do not, however, see any random, internmittent activity such as what you described. I will update firmware and try tests again and advise. Really strange.
George

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Alan;
By the way, email me your phone number and I will call-easier to discuss some of this stuff than try and write about it.
George M. Perzel
gperzel@rochester.rr.com