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Vinyl Cutter Plug In Please


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I have recently upgraded my old Mac Powerbook, running OS10.4.8. I am unable to use my older Adobe CS2 programs on the newer Mac OS Catalina. 

I am trialing Affinity Designer and Photo at the moment. Great, Easy programs to use and perfect for vector based sign design. I was all ready to purchase Affinity programs but I am disappointed not to be able find a supported Graphtec Plug In to enable the exporting of Designer EPS s to Cutting Master 4.

Has anyone found a way of solving this problem?

I would really love to support Affinity and move away from Adobe.

Cheers, Jimoz.

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  • Staff

Hi @jimoz,

Welcome to the forums :)

6 hours ago, jimoz said:

am disappointed not to be able find a supported Graphtec Plug In to enable the exporting of Designer EPS s to Cutting Master 4.

Has anyone found a way of solving this problem?

Unfortunately Affinity Designer doesn't support any plugin capabilities currently - this is something we hope to add in a future update, however we have no timescale for this at this time, my apologies.

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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On 1/9/2021 at 12:56 AM, jimoz said:

Has anyone found a way of solving this problem?

I would really love to support Affinity and move away from Adobe.

Cheers, Jimoz.

This is why you're really better off using a separate standalone cutting software to drive your cutter, rather than using a plug-in that traps you into dependency upon a single general-purpose drawing program. My cutters are Rowland. But if your hardware is Graphtec, have you not looked into one of the  Graphtec Studio applications?

With a separate cutting-prep application, you can use whatever drawing software you want, so long as it can export to a common vector file format that the cutting application can import. In the case of Affinity, that would be SVG, which is indicated on Graphtec's site as one of the formats supported by Graphtec Studio. You would:

  1. Do the drawing in Affinity
  2. Export as SVG
  3. Import the SVG into Graphtec Studio
  4. Set whatever device-specific options or features the software provides
  5. Send from Graphtec Studio to the cutter

Typically, what actually drives cutters is just ordinary simple pen-up, move-to, pen-down HPGL instructions. So even when you use your Graphtec plug-in for Illustrator, what's really going on is, the plug-in is converting the Bezier curves to plotter language and then sending it to the cutter's driver.

JET

 

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There are a few more things inside such a plugin. And wouldn't it be nice leaving out the steps 2 and 3? Not only talking about saving some time, but also avoiding errors during export and import.

finecut.jpg

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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6 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

There are a few more things inside such a plugin. And wouldn't it be nice leaving out the steps 2 and 3? Not only talking about saving some time, but also avoiding errors during export and import.

There is a lot of functionality in a dedicated standalone cutting application, too. As for steps 2 and 3; no. That's what enables me to use the single familiar cutting / driving application with all the vector-based drawing program I have, and to use files provided by others outside my shop.

But again, the primary advantage is avoiding mission-critical dependency upon a single drawing software 'host' for the plug-in.

JET

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Thanks Jet,

That sounds obvious now. I hadn't looked at Graphtec Studio, I think I was still coming at it from the design program plus a plugin to communicate with the plotter. 

I have installed Graphtec's Studio and should be able to work with that by importing files or just using GS alone.

Cheers,

Jimoz.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 3 weeks later...
  • Staff

Hi @CB1978,

My sincerest apologies for the delayed response here!

I can confirm that unfortunately Affinity Designer V2 doesn't yet support plugins, though this is something our developers are still looking into and hoping to support in the future.

I hope this clears things up :)

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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