Illustrator is a powerful program with a sometimes overwhelming number of tools.
How to use a laser cutter with illustrator.
When working with laser cutters it is important to know the difference between vector images and raster images.
You must transform the text into an outline by converting the text into anchor points and.
Drag in images you d like to etch engrave or vector files you d like to cut out.
Any cutouts smaller than material thickness will not be accurate and may not be possible to cut.
Prepare texts and embedding parts 1.
Open the program and create a new document.
The laser cutter comes with specific drivers which convert an image from a computer into a format that the laser cutter can read.
Here are a few.
View in outlines toggle ctrl y this mimics how the laser cutter will view and process your drawing.
Most co2 laser cutters work very much like your everyday inkjet printer.
You can do this by setting up a few useful tools in illustrator.
Let s start by opening the program and creating a new document.
This tutorial explains how to set up your documents in illustrator to use with a laser cutter so that you can mark engrave and cut your own designs on a ran.
Again using material thickness as a minimum size for details would be a good rule of thumb.
In section output make sure that rgb has been selected as the color space.
If you are designing something in illustrator on your own computer to print later it doesn t matter whether you re using mac of pc but we only have a pc driver to print to the epilog lasers.
Open adobe illustrator create a 24 x 12 artboard.
How to create a laser cut file in illustrator step 1.
When uploading your file on our website.
Invert the inside and the contour so you only have the outline left.
Laser cutting with illustrator.
Make sure to set the units to inches.
Clipping masks are an appearance tool specific to illustrator.
Click on print and the adobe illustrator print window opens.
First of all go to file new and adjust the width to 39 and height to 23 75 to match the laser cutter note that each dimension is 25 shorter than reality to avoid conflict with coreldraw.
Details and small features should never be smaller than the laser beam width 008 010.
Avoid sharp angles and details smaller objects.
