Hi,
I'm working with a craft store that uses CorelDraw to interface with a LaserPro (Spirit GE). Currently they only accept my design in JPEG which provides marginal results. Part of the problem is they don't understand their equipment nor CorelDraw. I'm frustrated because I know we could achieve much better results if they could import my vector art. I've tried exporting SVG, but they told me they were not able to use it.

Could anyone point me to a simple guide that might help me/them to capitalize on my Inkscape design?

I'm sure this topic is not original, but I'm new to forum and couldn't find the specific topic I was looking for (links welcome)

Thankyou

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

The only thing I know of, by which Inkscape SVG can be used on cutter machines, is found in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=31&t=4987 It's fairly restrictive, in that it does not work with Windows or Mac, only on Linux. And only on HPGL (Hewlett Packard format/machines).

But that's weird that a Laser cutter won't accept a vector format! Have you asked them about that, and explained the difference between raster and vector? I'm not very familiar with these cutter machines/technology, but it's been my understanding that they use ONLY vector formats. Do you think they only accept JPG, because it's the only format they understand, or with which they have experience?

Of course we have no idea about your relationship with this craft store (and we don't need to), but if you have a choice, I'm thinking your time might be better spent with a business who knows how to use their own equipment. It sounds like a bit of a hopeless situation, to me (and again, I'm no expert).
Oooohh, I see dollar signs with wings, lol!

Hi,
They use CorelDraw to interface with their laser pro. So if I can get my Inskape SVG to import into CorelDraw nicely I think that is all I need. They accept JPG because they don't know CorelDraw very well, and that's what they've done in the past! I use this business because they have very good rates... It's like a school - I know "you get what you pay for". But I was hoping that I could help them with the integration and achieve better results. I cringe when I'm in there watching them scale my JPG's to fit a circle drawn in Corel - when everything I gave them was originally to scale

Thanks.

I'm two years late to this post, but just in case anyone else is in a similar position, I found that CorelDraw does an abysmal job of importing svg (circles become semi-circles, unfilled areas become filled, elements get incorrect offsets), but if you export as .eps from inkscape then CorelDraw imports the drawing correctly.

Hi,
I had the similar problem. My solution that I found was to export SVG file in PDF format, then this PDF is available to import in CorelDraw, and make them vector file.

And, piling on this old thread but with more info.

I do most of my laser cutter/engraver designs in inkscape, and convert them to coreldraw manually. This works with CorelDraw X5,X6. Note that I mostly do vector drawings, so gradients, fills, extra bitmaps, etc may or may not work with this.

In inkscape:
* Make all the vector art, and color according to your engraver's driver settings. Don't worry about line widths too much here. Save file as drawing.svg
* Select all objects, and Convert-to-Paths. This changes circles and text to paths, which CorelDraw doesn't import correctly. Save a copy as Plain SVG, drawing-plain.svg
* Close the file without saving the original.
* Inkscape saves all SVG files in units of px, with 90 px per inch.

Start CorelDraw, and import the drawing-plain.svg.
* In document settings, set the page size accordingly, and move the objects to be on the page.
* Because CorelDraw uses an internal px density of 96 DPI, the shapes you just imported will be (1 - 90/96) or 6.25% too small. Select all objects, and uniformly scale by 96/90, or 106.666%
* Now go through and select the vector lines, and set to "hairline" width. Ensure other lines are appropriate width.
* Save the file as a .CDR if you want, or save it as SVG. I name these drawing-plain-corel.svg or drawing-plain.cdr.

I then print it. I use this process with CorelDraw X5 and X6, driving Universal Laser Systems or Trotec laser engravers for engraving and cutting. At one point I tried writing an Inkscape extension to do these transformations, but didn't know enough about the SVG format or Inkscape's/CorelDraw's peculiarities.

The interesting thing about this process is that if you do the final coreldraw saving as SVG, that file can be opened by inkscape and the objects will remain the same size (no scaling required in this case). This is because coreldraw assigns explicit units in the drawing size and the drawing's viewport, which inkscape handles on import correctly. Unfortunately, if you modify this in inkscape and write it back out, inkscape will not save this information the same way (reverting to its 90 DPI px units). I think inkscape and coreldraw both need to support defining the px unit size (DPI).

I'm going to start experimenting with printing directly from Inkscape to make this easier.

I'm having the same setup in the fab lab I use (I use inkscape, they have Corel draw) and what works perfect for me, is to just convert the svg file to an eps file, and then impot it with corel draw. I guess that's the fastest and most sophisticated way