T2 Help with Tracing

[tatawaki]

Very frustrated. Please help ease my pain!
all I want to do is create a SINGLE line with the image I've attached.  What's the best method? I have an AI vector I can manipulate and I have a high res image in photoshop.

1) auto trace creates an inside and outside line.
2) manual trace won't let me select the larger lines.
3) when I scale this down to 375 it looks aliased and horrible.

software constantly crashes as well. What am I doing wrong?
Note that I have a black border at the top of my file but when I open it in the software it doesn't show the top horizontal border.

I tried Centre Trace smooth but it still does line by line in the preview. so this file would take 343min.

Any help is appreciated!

[nottingham82]

for something like this you really need it to be a dxf file.  If you want to post the ai i can play around and see if I can come up with a good option for you.

[nottingham82]

also I finally got a centerline trace to work with it but only when I cropped the image.  It is too big and complicated for the centerline trace to work with the full image.  So I just did the outcropping in the middle.  I noticed It cant separate some of the extra bits.  the pixels are too close together so it draws them weird.  If you moved them apart a bit it would help tracing.  DXF is still the best bet though

[nottingham82]

ok now I got it to go with a centerline trace.  It takes too much memory though to do it with smooth or noise reduction on.  You need all the settings turned off. It got the top horizontal line but not the two vertical side lines.

[Zax]

Sorry you are frustrated, I try to make T2Laser easy to use but I think the image size is the problem here.

If you disable auto-zoom (so it displays 100%) you'll see the black borders, it's just such a large image that it's being lost when scaled down to fit the screen.

As nottingham82 said this should be a vector file, saved as DXF from whatever program you created it in. Trying to load as an image and doing raster-to-vector conversion is not going to produce good results.

[tatawaki]

I've generated a DXF file but again still issues. attached is the dxf file exported from illustrator:
2012, PNG 8 color, preserve appearance, scale 1mm = 1 unit, art board is 375mm wide by 200mm tall.

When I import, I get 'too complex' and then it only shows up as output size of 9608.9mm by 0.7mm

illustrator file also attached. I have 3 other layers like this that need to be cut so hopefully once this is solved, I can easily replicate for other layers.

[nottingham82]

ok I got it to go... finally.  I should have given up a dozen times lol.

So what I did was open your file in fusion 360 and resave it as a dxf.  Of course then several of the lines moved.  Why... I dunno.  So I went back to fusion 360.  deleted those lines and redrew them.  Then it worked.  I imported it into inkscape... because t2 didnt like fusions export... why... I dunno... Resaved with inkscape... and here you are.

Im sure there is a setting in illustrator that needs to be changed but I dont have illustrator to try it and see. 

[nottingham82]

and of course I didnt even see you posted the ai file. 

Opening that in inkscape and resaving as a dxf yields this.... super simple.  only problem is none of your lines are closed, but you could join selected nodes at the endpoints to make it all one line.

[nottingham82]

I was able to mess with illustrator today... none of the dxf export options will load in t2 or inkscape.  The easiest solution I found was to save the illustrator image as an svg.  Open in inkscape and resave as a dxf.  that seemed to work reliably.

If you dont want to deal with inkscape the other option is to save it as a pdf from illustrator and use agastar's pdf to dxf converter which can be used within t2laser.  To do that download this file

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a6izu5tzu39t4yk/Convert2DxfCmd.zip?dl=1

then select File-Convert PDF  you will get an error the first time telling you to download the converter then a file window will open and you need to direct it to the program you just downloaded.  Hit ok then click File-Convert PDF again and this time you can select your pdf. 

[tatawaki]

I was able to mess with illustrator today... none of the dxf export options will load in t2 or inkscape.  The easiest solution I found was to save the illustrator image as an svg.  Open in inkscape and resave as a dxf.  that seemed to work reliably.

If you dont want to deal with inkscape the other option is to save it as a pdf from illustrator and use agastar's pdf to dxf converter which can be used within t2laser.  To do that download this file

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a6izu5tzu39t4yk/Convert2DxfCmd.zip?dl=1

then select File-Convert PDF  you will get an error the first time telling you to download the converter then a file window will open and you need to direct it to the program you just downloaded.  Hit ok then click File-Convert PDF again and this time you can select your pdf.

OK tried with inkscape. get error and couldn't save as dxf. How are you going about your process?

[nottingham82]

step one
open your file in illustrator

Step 2
File-Save as - change to svg file

Step 3
Open svg file in inkscape

Step 4
File-Save As- .dxf

turn off poly line and robo line.  I have included screenshots.

[Zax]

I will take a look at the DXF, but you might want to try these steps with Illustrator before saving as a DXF:

a) right click and select "create outlines"
b) to improve quality, in the object menu select path then "add anchor points", you can repeat this several times as needed
c) ungroup the text, select the object menu and click "ungroup"

[Zax]

I used QCAD to move the lower left to 0,0 and set the dimensions to metric, I think it looks correct.

[tatawaki]

Thanks for everyone's help. I was able to produce what I wanted and just waiting to see if the work gets approved for a small run of 7.

[Zax]

That's cool, nice job!