Vector line length measuring

[Doug Griffith]

Also don't forget you have the time it takes the laser to get from object to object. There is no way to figure this in.

I agree. That is what I referred to as "rapid moves".

There would have to be a "guestimate rapids" slider as well.

My reasoning for wanting to be able to estimate cut times through Illustrator/Corel is to give better quotes. I quite often find myself giving quotes when I have my laptop but am not near my machine. With my script, I load their file, run the script, enter the speed at the prompt, and am returned the cut time. This gives me a good starting point.

Cheers,
Doug

[Dave Adams]

I have a stained/leaded glass business. The graphic program for my stained glass patterns is 'Glass Eye' by dragonfly software (www.dfly.com). There is a calculator for lead came usage built into the program - so I save my Corel file as a dxf and import it into Glass Eye. I then enter it into a Excel speadsheet that has inches per second calculated from timed tests at different speeds. I have found that it is very accurate and a quick and easy way to quote jobs.

[Pete Andrew]

Well you've all been very helpful here. It is obviously something that has been thought through by a few of you, though only by Universal lasers (by the sounds) in terms of manufacturers. I have a Laser Pro Mercury, or I believe they are called Pinnacle in the states.

Doug - that sounds like a really interesting script you are developing there - I too would love to know more when it's finished. I know very little about scripts or scripting, but am sure I should....

Rodne - both initial links you sent are for downloads for Corel Draw 10 and up. For reasons that even I am finding hard to justify, I run my laser from a laptop running Corel Draw 9. It is never updated, doesn't know the internet exists, and keeps doing what I ask it to. My window on the world is via, now, a Mac. So I am learning Illustrator CS4.

And thanks Carl, but I won't be trying the macro you attached as my Draw9 will probably rebel at a Suite 13 macro - (are they up to Suite 16 yet? - ah those were the days.....)

Andrea - it is just the increase in size and the reduction in speed required to cut the acrylic that has made the job take longer, but you are correct in the idea of node clean up being a good thing - but this job has the right number of nodes, thank you!

Dave - that sounds like a pretty good workaround - if only I had a copy of Glass Eye.......!

Which is why the pathlength plug in Doug mentioned may be the way ahead, if it is usable in CS4. That or a call to the suppliers of Laserpro machines in the UK. Which will I think prove fruitless. I will have to do a bit of digging and report back if I find anything out.

Otherwise, I would welcome any more suggestions....!

[Carl Sewell]

And thanks Carl, but I won't be trying the macro you attached as my Draw9 will probably rebel at a Suite 13 macro

What a shame. It's not even worth a few moments of your time to try? Then again, it is possible that it will destroy your computer configuration, so you'd better not.

For what it is worth, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) was added to version 9 of CorelDraw. VBA macros are NOT version specific like CDR files. A macro written with X3 will work with earlier versions of CorelDraw provided commands specific to newer versions were not used. Not all VBA macros work across all versions of CorelDraw.

[Pete Andrew]

For those of you who use Illustrator CS4, there is a way to find the length of the paths in your files that i have just found out on the adobe site.

Click on Window and check on Document Info. On that little palette that comes up, the document info includes under Paths, the length of (and other info concerning) the selected paths.

However - of course the rest of you are right in that the rapid moves etc aren't factored in, but it is a start at any rate.