Oopsie daisy!

[Slammer]

Right, so here is the sorry tale so far.

Last year I got myself a pre-loved five year old Curio Silhouette plotting cutter, running with Silhouette Studio to send my files to the plotter. And I love it. It belonged to a woman who thought she could do all sorts of not near defined "things" with it, but soon found out that the learning curve is steep indeed, especially if you don´t know the difference between a vector and a pixel, so I got it cheap.

Cheap is my thang and I am far too miserly to purchase the full version of SS and use the version that is supplied with the plotter, it does everything I need and it does it well-ish, I have to do an online conversion of Affinity´s SGV to DFX, but hey. If it works, it´s not stupid.

But the Curio has it´s drawbacks, the machine is plasticy, and it is only A5 and if you want a short run of, say, 50 cards or cuts, then it will...take...time. In short it is limited for the projects that I would like to do in the future.

So about a month ago, the printshop I like to go to announced that they are chucking in the towel and that their Graphtec plotter with Autofeed would be available for a very, very reasonable price. And although I whined at the thought of parting with my money, I got the plotter and I have just spent the weekend setting it up.

And now comes the pain.

Cutting Master 5, you know, the software that sends the outline to the plotter uses a plug-in for Illustrator or Coral and I can´t find a way to import any format I can throw at it out of Affinity and now I´m stumped.

Anybody got any ideas?

 

[firstdefence]

If it's sending directly from Illustrator, the chances are it's proprietary Ai files and not just a PDF, same with CorelDraw.

You may have to buy a compatible version of CorelDraw or Illustrator.

Which model is the plotter cutter?

 

[Slammer]

It´s a CE6000- plus with autofeed

Well that was unexpected, seems that Silhouette Studio will happily send outlines to the Graphtec without putting up much of a fight.
Need to do tests as I can see some potential issues but I would be happy with that result.

Tomorrow though, my hot water bottle is under the covers and it´s now sleepy time in Bavaria.

[henryanthony]

These guys say they support your cutter. If true, there are probably other software available too. HTH. 

https://www.easycutstudio.com/#:~:text=Introducing Easy Cut Studio,designs with your cutting plotter.
 

https://www.easycutstudio.com/supported-vinyl-cutters.html

[firstdefence]

Just tried with illustrator and using the Send to does indeed send to CM5 but I have no idea what format it Illustrator sends it to CM5, I suspect it's either DXF, SVG or Ai but there is no indication. You can't drag and drop either and I've checked all the file formats such as DXF Ai SVG and when trying to add to queue they are all greyed out.

[Slammer]

7 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Just tried with illustrator and using the Send to does indeed send to CM5 but I have no idea what format it Illustrator sends it to CM5, I suspect it's either DXF, SVG or Ai but there is no indication. You can't drag and drop either and I've checked all the file formats such as DXF Ai SVG and when trying to add to queue they are all greyed out.

Last night, just before drifting off to the land of nod, I suddenly remembered, the memory sending icy cold fingers of fear down my spine. Some years ago I worked with the CE5000 series including the autofeed and for that to take cuts you had to save in Illustrator 88.

BRRRR!

It doesn´s seem that the plotter on its own is the problem, it is this autofeed.

[Dan C]

Hi @Slammer,

There has been previous similar discussions regarding Graphtec vinyl cutters in the below thread - 

Unfortunately as mentioned there Affinity Designer does not support plugins currently, however you may wish to try exporting from Affinity to SVG/PDF and then importing this file in Graphtec Studio for use with your cutter.

I hope this helps

[Slammer]

On 3/7/2023 at 1:43 PM, Dan C said:

Hi @Slammer,

There has been previous similar discussions regarding Graphtec vinyl cutters in the below thread - 

Unfortunately as mentioned there Affinity Designer does not support plugins currently, however you may wish to try exporting from Affinity to SVG/PDF and then importing this file in Graphtec Studio for use with your cutter.

I hope this helps

Thanks but sadly not really. By now I have figured out how to import and cut one bit files. That is not the big problem.
The really, rrrrealy big problem is the autofeed system, this thing here:
http://www.graphteccorp.com/product/f-mark2/index.html

It can take either Illustrator 88 one bit files (talk about a blast from the past) or EPS. Now I have done the obvious and exported EPS via Affinity and was able to find and click on the file to import it into the I-Mark software where the whole bally thing crashes. My hopes and dreams were centered on I-Mark being able to import EPS from Affinity....

I use a Mac and have used them since the OS came on three diskettes and I have used the I-Mark Software on a Mac in the past, so my bet was rather safe....

BUT!

It seems that the I-mark software for Mac is no longer available, not to download or to procure anywhere in the usual places, so I brought my creditcard to operating temperatures and sallied forth, on the hunt for a cheap PC. I found a nice little HP for 80 Euros and for the first time in my life I am owner of a DOS PC, (I think they call it "Windows" now a days though)
Anyway, got it set up, made a mini network via smb so that I can access Win 10 folders on my HighSierra and I can shovel files from my 2011 magic mac mini to the DOS-box, but I can´t open the Affinity EPS in I-mark.

It can do Illustrator 88 native files, or Coral Draw EPS, so why am I having such a problem with Affinity´s EPS. Encapsulated PostScript is Encapsulated PostScrip is it not?
Is there something in the EPS header that needs to change?

 

 

AAAARRRGH! SO CLOSE AND YET SO FAR.

[Slammer]

Well I wrote to Graphtec and asked for help. Their, very fast, response basically says that although the I-Mark software thinks that all EPS´s are equal, some EPS´s are more equal than others, and that I should use AI.

Not going to happen.

So, the hunt is on for a way to convert bad EPS to good EPS.

 

 

***bugger***

[firstdefence]

This website has a snippet of interesting info re EPS: https://www.prepressure.com/library/file-formats/eps see quoted info below.

Quote

 

More in-depth information on the EPS file format

An EPS file must conform to the Adobe Document Structuring Conventions (DSC). These are a set of rules that define how PostScript data should be organized.

At a minimum, it must include a header comment, %!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0, and a bounding box comment, %%BoundingBox: llx lly urx ury, that describes the bounds of the illustration. (The specification does not require the EPSF version, but many programs will reject a file that does not have it.)

The EPS program must not use operators that initialize or permanently change the state of the machine in a manner that cannot be undone by the enclosing application’s use of save and restore (e.g.. the operators starting with ‘init’ like initgraphics). As a special case, the EPS program may use the showpage operator. The importing application is responsible for disabling the normal effects of showpage. The EPS program should make no environment-sensitive decisions (the importing application may be trying to attain some special effect, and the EPS program shouldn’t screw this up), although it can use some device-dependent tricks to improve appearance such as a snap-to-pixel algorithm.

There are some operators that should not be used within an EPS file: banddevice, cleardictstack, copypage, erasepage, exitserver, framedevice, grestoreall, initclip, initgraphics, initmatrix, quit, renderbands, setglobal, setpagedevice, setshared and startjob. These also include operators from statusdict and userdict operators like legal, letter, a4, b5, etc. There are some operators that should be carefully used: nulldevice, setgstate, sethalftone, setmatrix, setscreen, settransfer, and undefinefont.

EPS files can be encoded using 7-bits (ASCII, like PostScript data usually are) as well as 8-bits (binary, which is virtually always done on Macintosh because it decreases the file size significantly). 8-bit EPS-files cannot be handled properly by all operating systems or applications.

The image preview

EPS files can optionally contain a bitmapped image preview so that systems that can’t render PostScript directly can at least display a crude representation of what the graphic will look like.

There are 4 preview formats:

• PICT, mainly used in files generated on Macs. The PICT file is stored in the resource fork of the EPS file while the actual PostScript data are stored in the data fork. PICT is the default file format of QuickDraw, the graphics model that is used by MacOS 7/8/9 applications to generate the screen display.
• TIFF: Most EPS files created by Windows applications contain a TIFF file for preview purposes.
• Metafile: Some EPS files originating on PC contain a Windows Metafile preview. WMF or Windows Metafile is the PC equivalent of the Macintosh PICT file format.
• EPSI is an EPS file with a platform device independent preview. EPSI is an all ASCII (no binary data or headers) version of EPS. EPSI provides for a hexadecimal encoded preview representation of the image that will be displayed or printed. EPSI files were documented by Adobe as a means of providing a preview for EPS files which would be cross-platform. In reality, though, DOS machines and Windows favor embedding TIFF or even Windows Metafiles in the PostScript. EPSI is mainly used on Unix systems.

It is also possible to have an EPS file without a preview, though. In this case, the imported file is usually displayed as a grayed out box or a box with diagonal lines running through it.

The preview image has a fixed resolution, which is usually 72 dpi. If you enlarge an EPS file in a document, the preview image is stretched and may become ‘blocky’ and lacking in detail. This does not necessarily mean that the EPS-data themselves will degrade in quality. As long as the EPS-file only contains text and vector graphics, scaling it does not affect its quality.

If you print a file containing an EPS-image on a non-PostScript printer, it is usually the preview image that gets printed. The preview image is ignored when you print to a PostScript device.

Remarks

Although an EPS file contains PostScript data, you cannot always send it straight to a printer to have it printed. Some interpreters cannot handle the preview data that may be included in the EPS file. Others don’t output the file because the ‘showpage’ operator is missing. It can also happen that the printer does process the job but outputs a blank page because the content of the EPS-file was located outside the printable area.

EPS-files can contain PostScript level 2 operators that make it impossible to output the file on an old PostScript level 1 device.

 

 

[firstdefence]

You need to find an eps that will work and compare the code, so I exported a simple EPS which was a Circle with 200mm diameter, fill 100% Magenta, Stroke was 0.05mm 100% Black, this is Affinity Designers EPS code for that file. To get the code simply open an EPS in TextEdit on Mac, probably similar on Windows.

%!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0
%%HiResBoundingBox: 0 0 1296 1656
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 1296 1656
%%Creator: Serif Affinity
%LanguageLevel: 3
%%DocumentData: Clean7Bit
%%EndComments
%%BeginProlog
101 dict begin
/m/moveto
/l/lineto
/c/curveto
3{load def}repeat
%%EndProlog
gsave
 
 % Artboard1
  
  % Ellipse
    newpath
    642.444 1117.021 m
    798.892 1117.021 925.908 990.005 925.908 833.556 c
    925.908 677.108 798.892 550.092 642.444 550.092 c
    485.995 550.092 358.979 677.108 358.979 833.556 c
    358.979 990.005 485.995 1117.021 642.444 1117.021 c
    closepath
    /DeviceRGB setcolorspace
    0.926 0 0.548 setcolor
    gsave
     eofill
     grestore
    /DeviceRGB setcolorspace
    0.136 0.121 0.124 setcolor
    0.142 setlinewidth
    1 setlinecap
    1 setlinejoin
    [] 0 setdash
    stroke
 grestore
showpage
end

 

[henryanthony]

@Slammer Did you check the links I posted. The company specifically lists your machine as supported by their software product along with about a thousand other plotter/cutters. They also say to call them if your machine is not listed. I am thinking these machines basically all work the same but have some kind of proprietary initializing requirements. The software is only $60.00. So might be worth a look or not...

[Dan C]

My apologies, thanks for confirming that for me!

17 hours ago, Slammer said:

It can do Illustrator 88 native files, or Coral Draw EPS, so why am I having such a problem with Affinity´s EPS

If you can provide a copy of a 'good' EPS file that works as expected, and a copy of your Affinity EPS file I would be happy to investigate this further by inspecting the files in a text editor, as firstdefence has mentioned above, to see if I can pinpoint the exact requirements for their software to read these EPS files and provide suggestions to how you may be able to export these types of EPS files from Affinity

[Slammer]

6 minutes ago, Dan C said:

My apologies, thanks for confirming that for me!

If you can provide a copy of a 'good' EPS file that works as expected, and a copy of your Affinity EPS file I would be happy to investigate this further by inspecting the files in a text editor, as firstdefence has mentioned above, to see if I can pinpoint the exact requirements for their software to read these EPS files and provide suggestions to how you may be able to export these types of EPS files from Affinity

Thanks for that Dan C, however I had further correspondence with Graphtec techsupport and they have made it very clear that the EPS import was never a high priority thing and that although I-Mark says it can import EPS... and it should be able to import EPS.... It can´t !

BOOM!

It looks like I will have to bite the sour apple and try and get a pre-cloud version of Illustrator on Ebay.
And now my colleague is asking why I am so pissed off today.

 

[Slammer]

44 minutes ago, henryanthony said:

@Slammer Did you check the links I posted. The company specifically lists your machine as supported by their software product along with about a thousand other plotter/cutters. They also say to call them if your machine is not listed. I am thinking these machines basically all work the same but have some kind of proprietary initializing requirements. The software is only $60.00. So might be worth a look or not...

Yes I did, however I found how to get it running with the software supplied. Seem that the Mac version of the Software is a tad, how can I say? Lackluster. The main problem is that the I-Mark software which runs the robotic feederassy is no longer available on Mac. I wanted to get a PC anyway so I went out and got a nice little HP elite.
Now I am stuck with the fact that I am going to have to find a way to feed it Illustrator 88 files.

 

[Dan C]

I'm certainly sorry to hear that and I understand your frustration here!

I wish you luck in resolving this

[Slammer]

4 hours ago, Dan C said:

I'm certainly sorry to hear that and I understand your frustration here!

I wish you luck in resolving this

I will keep the brethren informed. Watch this space for the next gripping installment of:

"Slammer and the Plotter"

[henryanthony]

Just for giggles, I contacted the Easy Cut folks. Here is the response:

Hello,

 

Thank you for your inquiry!

 

What is the exact model of your cutter? is it a Graphtec CE6000 Plus?

 

Easy Cut Studio work with Graphtec CE6000 Plus, and fully compatible with macOS and Windows.

 

 >Is the Mac version of Easycut studio equivalent to the Windows version. 

 

Yes, Yes, the Mac version of Easy Cut Studio is equivalent to the Windows version.

They are exactly the same.

 

 >I have the robotic feeder assembly. Does this present any other problems or will the EasyCut handle this as well.

 

Sorry, I don't know what the robotic feeder assembly is.  

You can downoad the trial verison of easy cut studio from 

https://www.easycutstudio.com/download.html

and have a try.

 

[Slammer]

1 hour ago, henryanthony said:

Just for giggles, I contacted the Easy Cut folks. Here is the response:

Hello,

 

Thank you for your inquiry!

 

What is the exact model of your cutter? is it a Graphtec CE6000 Plus?

 

Easy Cut Studio work with Graphtec CE6000 Plus, and fully compatible with macOS and Windows.

 

 >Is the Mac version of Easycut studio equivalent to the Windows version. 

 

Yes, Yes, the Mac version of Easy Cut Studio is equivalent to the Windows version.

They are exactly the same.

 

 >I have the robotic feeder assembly. Does this present any other problems or will the EasyCut handle this as well.

 

Sorry, I don't know what the robotic feeder assembly is.  

You can downoad the trial verison of easy cut studio from 

https://www.easycutstudio.com/download.html

and have a try.

 

Thanks for that. Very much appreciated. As I said before, I don´t have a problem with the plotter itsself. It is this damn feeder and it is a separate unit to the plotter. The PC is connected to the feeder and it uses this I-Mark software that only takes Ilustartor 88 files. the plotter is connected to the feeder and gets it´s instructions from the feeder.

 

[Slammer]

Anyway I think I have found a workaround....

My plan is to use Affinity to create the files I want to cut out and then send them to the printers for printing. I will send the cut path to the printer and let THEM convert it to Illus88.

[Slammer]

Sooo, here is a little update on this sorry tale.

 

I got a converted test file from the printers, I sent an eps file created in Designer and got Illustrator88 path back. I can load it and send it to the autofeed. So far, so good. It´s just that the procedure is a pain in the rectum and at some point, when this has annoyed me enough, I will probably get a pre-cloud version of Illustrator, just to give me the ability to convert in house.So, I can do it if I must, but would rather avoid the hassle.

For the normal, day to day, jobs I create a eps file in Designer on the Mac and send it to the PC. Open Cutting Sudio, import the file, take a sip of tea and watch as Cutting Studio crashes. What an unstable, crash-happy, bag of bug-fixes this software is turning out to be. On the Mac however CS will quite happily import eps without a problem.

The solution is then obvious. MAC-1, PC-0. Again my trusty 12 year old Mac wipes the floor with a three year old PC.

*sigh* *BIG SIGH*

In the artwork I want to do I require the ability to set a cut sequence according to the detail I wish to cut.

Every Software used for cutting that I have come across has this ability by assigning to layers or assigning to colors.

THIS *curses* Soft*curses*ware requires a *curses* up*curses*grade to the tune of a *curses* 500 *curses* Euro „Pro“ *curses* version…

*Curses!*

Feel my pain.