#LASERDRW ALTERNATIVE FOR FREE#
#LASERDRW ALTERNATIVE HOW TO#

Most fonts have them, but when cutting what is essentially a stencil, the paper will fall apart if we leave these in. Counters are the isolated white spaces inside letters. Zapfino is a really good font to use, not only because it's super-classy, but also because the strokes are often very thin, making it easy to 'cut to the counters'. Now it's time to pick and type the letters. Select the Rectangle and give it no fill with a 1pt red stroke (making it red will be important later). smaller than the largest face of your gift in each dimension (if you don't have your rulers turned on in Illustrator, do so by hitting Command-r.

Use the Rectangle tool, and make a rectangle that is 1 in. We need to make a rectangle that will define the edges of our gift-tag. It will be helpful to set your document size to match the size of your laser cutter's print range. 6) A present to wrap.įirst we need to make our vector document where we will doctor our letters. I used plain manila, which looks nice and clean against the craft paper. 2) Some kind of gift-wrap to wrap your gift in. I'm going to use Illustrator's interface for this example. You can also use CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape is a great open-source vector program. Needed materials: 1) A vector-based graphics program. Warning: This technique may impress your boy/girlfriend.

Here are all the steps I took to alter the letters and package my gift. It would take a very sharp knife, a very steady hand, and a lot of patience, but it's a nice alternative since not everyone has access to laser cutting equipment. Also, a laser cutter is nice, and very effective, but after altering type in the way I've outlined here, you could cut the letters out by hand.

#LASERDRW ALTERNATIVE FOR FREE#

In fact, the usefulness of having a laser or stencil-friendly version of a font was so novel, I started working on an OpenType version called Stencilano that is available for free beta download now. It seemed a great opportunity to test out a few techniques, and the result was a stylish success. It started with a present for my father, then a present for a friend, and a wedding present, and this example is based off of a package of fashion show schwag that I gave to someone. There are a lot of 'stencil fonts' out there to be had for free, but a lot of them are pretty limited stylistically so I have been working with creating 'laser-safe' versions of other more decorative, less industrial fonts. I've been working on the design for a few art-objects that need laser-cut letters, and decided it would be good to prototype some letters first, to get a sense of what's required.

#LASERDRW ALTERNATIVE HOW TO#

I try to do as little positioning in MoshiDraw as possible, as it tends to do weird scaling of what you're trying to work on if you're not careful.This is a simple set of instructions for anyone with access to a laser cutter on how to use a vector-based graphics program to alter text in such a way as to make it laser-cut friendly. Once everything is correct, I can generally cut with Moshidraw without any issue. This appears to be a failing of how CorelDraw handles HPGL, and is unrelated to Moshi In that case, I add a miniscule square to that corner of the drawing, which forces the toolpath back where it should when imported. plt file fouls up and tries to make a shortcut, cutting off a corner of a drawing. plt file to MoshiDraw, verify everything looks correct Create drawing in Illustrator, finalize, and export as a DXF.If I'm doing a simple shape, I can use CorelDraw 12 and the plugin and everything works, for both raster engraving and cutting.įor complex shapes, here's my goofy weirdo toolchain: The plugin crashes to desktop if I try anything aside from a rectangle or ellipse.

I've found that using the CorelDraw 12 plugin works reasonably well, but can't handle complex shapes.

Laserdrw alternative