Preparing Artwork for EZCAD

[Kristian Matz]

Has anyone come up with a good system for preparing logos and text for importing in to ezcad? So far I have tried corel (x5) and illustrator.

All of our artwork are clean vectors, we do not use any bitmaps. I have a lot of experience preparing logos for engraving on both rotary machines and lasers.

What is the best format to export? I have not been able to use corel with our having to do a lot of work to the art after I import in ezcad. Illustrator is better, but I still get a lot of duplicate lines and I have to go in and click on every line and delete one of them.

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you

[Scott Shepherd]

Have you tried saving it to AI v8? Still getting duplicates with that?

[Kristian Matz]

I will give it a shot. Is that from illustrator or corel?

[Scott Shepherd]

I will give it a shot. Is that from illustrator or corel?

Either one, maybe try both on the same file and see it one works better.

[Gary Hair]

An easy trick to simplify artwork is to use smart fill. Create a new layer and smartfill the image then export as an AI v8 file - 99.9% of your problems will go away.

[Kristian Matz]

I did a logo in both Corel (exported as .ai 8.0) and in Illustrator saved as .ai 8.0

The corel file was horrible and would take a long time to fix. The Illustrator file was pretty. I will continue to test.

[Kristian Matz]

I am trying to do this but I cant figure it out. I am adding a layer, selecting the smart fill tool and they clik the logo?

[Bert Kemp]

you have to clic inside the logo between the lines

[Bill George]

Export to EZCad I used DXF R14, text needs to be Hatched of course. The other I use is BMP and its slow but it gets done.

[Gary Hair]

I am trying to do this but I cant figure it out. I am adding a layer, selecting the smart fill tool and they clik the logo?

Click wherever you want to fill. Change the color to yellow so you can easily see what you have already filled in. It helps to draw a rectangle around the object so you can "contain" where it fills.

Here is a youtube video that shows the basics of how to use smartfill:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3dEyPM1dog

[Kristian Matz]

I figure out how to do it, thank you Gary. I exported the logo as .ai (8) and when I import it to EZCAD it has added a lot of extra lines. Am I missing a setting?

Click wherever you want to fill. Change the color to yellow so you can easily see what you have already filled in. It helps to draw a rectangle around the object so you can "contain" where it fills.

Here is a youtube video that shows the basics of how to use smartfill:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3dEyPM1dog

[Gary Hair]

I figure out how to do it, thank you Gary. I exported the logo as .ai (8) and when I import it to EZCAD it has added a lot of extra lines. Am I missing a setting?

Not that I'm aware of, that's why I use smart fill.

[Kristian Matz]

Sorry, I was asking about settings in the export. I see a bunch of options in addition to selecting the export version.

[Gary Hair]

I use:
Preserve curves and text by removing transparent effects - the other option will create bitmaps, you don't want that!
Export text as curves - ezcad won't import text as text from an ai file, at least I haven't been able to make it work.
Convert outlines to objects

[Kristian Matz]

Ok, I changed my export setting to match yours and now it seems to be working.

Thank you!