How To Use A Laser Cutter With Illustrator

Any cutouts smaller than material thickness will not be accurate and may not be possible to cut.

How to use a laser cutter with illustrator.

Let s start by opening the program and creating a new document. When working with laser cutters it is important to know the difference between vector images and raster images. View in outlines toggle ctrl y this mimics how the laser cutter will view and process your drawing. To release clipping masks select all vector strokes and fills select object clipping mask release you can then either then trace or redraw them.

You must transform the text into an outline by converting the text into anchor points and. 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. Click on print and the adobe illustrator print window opens. You can do this by setting up a few useful tools in illustrator.

Prepare texts and embedding parts 1. Open adobe illustrator create a 24 x 12 artboard. Most co2 laser cutters work very much like your everyday inkjet printer. Invert the inside and the contour so you only have the outline left.

Make sure to set the units to inches. 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. In section output make sure that rgb has been selected as the color space. Clipping masks are an appearance tool specific to illustrator.

Avoid sharp angles and details smaller objects. When uploading your file on our website. The laser cutter comes with specific drivers which convert an image from a computer into a format that the laser cutter can read. Illustrator is a powerful program with a sometimes overwhelming number of tools.

Again using material thickness as a minimum size for details would be a good rule of thumb. How to create a laser cut file in illustrator step 1. Then click on setup and the classic print dialog 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.

Open the program and create a new document. Laser cutting with illustrator. Here are a few.