Vinyl cutter software workflow

[Colin Angevine]

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone out there has a good software workflow for designing & cutting with a vinyl cutter. I have a Roland GX-24 and while it plays nicely with Illustrator on my personal laptop with a Creative Cloud subscription, it seems there are no good options for students. The best thing that I have working: design in Inkscape, copy all the paths of the design, paste them into CutStudio (Roland's software) and cut.

I spent a lot of time this week looking for a single-app option and haven't found one:

• I haven't found any plugins for Inkscape that will allow me to cut directly
• CutStudio can't import .svg and will only import .eps files made from Illustrator, so copying & pasting seems necessary
• Roland's drivers don't work with the latest versions of Illustrator or CorelDraw, so even if I tried to spend money on purchasing software it wouldn't help

Anyone out there have advice? Thanks for any suggestions you can offer!

Colin

[Jaymes Dec]

Colin,

Our students copy the paths from Inkscape and paste into CutStudio. It's a bit clunky but not too bad.

Jaymes

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[Colin Angevine]

Thanks, Jaymes. It's inconvenient (especially since students will likely be designing on a separate machine before opening in Inkscape, copying, and pasting into CutStudio), but good to know that it works and I'm not the only one.

best,

Colin

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[Joseph Chiu]

Does cut studio take dxf?

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[Colin Angevine]

Nope. No .dxf files. Even .eps files need to be generated specifically by Illustrator, I'm pretty sure.

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[neobob...@gmail.com]

Just curious... Can CutStudio read an SVG file?

[Colin Angevine]

Nope. I'm surprised how limited it is. (Documentation here.)

On Sat, Oct 4, 2014 at 5:26 PM, <neobob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just curious... Can CutStudio read an SVG file?

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[Jason Mickelson]

I attend Jaymes' workshop at Fablearn last year and saw this workflow in action for cutting copper sheets. The copy/paste method into CutStudio (from Illustrator, in my case) was fairly seamless.

[ndigiorgio]

Any updates on a possible solution to go from Inkscape to CutStudio, the vector way?

• Tried EPS, no luck with any version
• Copy, paste doesn't work perfectly
• Exporting as a PDF results in "bad" file
• jpg, png, and image outlines aren't perfect

[andrew carle]

SVG doesn't work? 

Sent from my iPhone

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[Jaymes Dec]

I have seen svgs get imported into Cut studio funky. But you should be able to select and copy vectors from inkscape and paste into Cut studio. 

For what its worth, I found that Cut studio CAN import AI files that are saved as a legacy version (Illustrator 8). So that is what we do now skipping inkscape entirely.

On Sep 7, 2017 5:01 PM, "andrew carle" <andre...@gmail.com> wrote:

SVG doesn't work? 

Sent from my iPhone

On 8 Sep 2017, at 5:23 AM, ndigiorgio <nick.di...@gmail.com> wrote:

Any updates on a possible solution to go from Inkscape to CutStudio, the vector way?

• Tried EPS, no luck with any version
• Copy, paste doesn't work perfectly
• Exporting as a PDF results in "bad" file
• jpg, png, and image outlines aren't perfect

On Friday, October 3, 2014 at 7:02:54 PM UTC-4, Colin Angevine wrote:

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone out there has a good software workflow for designing & cutting with a vinyl cutter. I have a Roland GX-24 and while it plays nicely with Illustrator on my personal laptop with a Creative Cloud subscription, it seems there are no good options for students. The best thing that I have working: design in Inkscape, copy all the paths of the design, paste them into CutStudio (Roland's software) and cut.

I spent a lot of time this week looking for a single-app option and haven't found one:

• I haven't found any plugins for Inkscape that will allow me to cut directly
• CutStudio can't import .svg and will only import .eps files made from Illustrator, so copying & pasting seems necessary
• Roland's drivers don't work with the latest versions of Illustrator or CorelDraw, so even if I tried to spend money on purchasing software it wouldn't help

Anyone out there have advice? Thanks for any suggestions you can offer!

Colin

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[gregm...@gmail.com]

Hi Colin-

I struggled with for the better part of a day this summer.  I found that the cut/paste option didn't provide a high quality solution-- iw as getting small jagged edges on my vinyl, presumably from artifacting during the cut and paste process.  I ended up finding an Inkscape extension that works with PC machines.  I installed it and now have students do all of their design work in Inkscape and ta the very end, remove any Fill and set the Stroke .001".  Then I select all and run the extension. 

I believe this is the link:  https://github.com/mgmax/inkscape-roland-cutstudio

Hope this helps!

Greg

On Friday, October 3, 2014 at 7:02:54 PM UTC-4, Colin Angevine wrote:

[Sammie Smith]

One of our work arounds is Google drawings.  Students can import almost anything into a google drawing and then immediately export as a jpeg.  Having their artwork as a jpeg then allows them to extract the contour lines in Cut Studio.

Keep in mind we are a google school so every student has a google account that includes google drawings.

Has worked nicely for us but would not work for everyone...

Sammie

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[bali...@florence.k12.nj.us]

A good software for a vinyl cutter is Inkscape, you can download it for free and it's fun and easy to use. Remember if you're using it to cut using a Roland GX-24 or any other cutter, remember to set the parameters to millimeters not pixels.

[Wilmer Gaona]

Hello Colin I am using Inkscape exporting the file to .eps and opening this in CutStudio. This work great

[Wilmer Gaona]

Do you vectorize your paths before saving as .eps?