Full Version: Are cutters good at plotting?
From: sfsjkid [#1]
14 Sep 2005
To: ALL
I'm considering the purchase of a Roland GX-24 or similar for vinyl cutting, but to double as a plotter. The things I would like to plot are plans for model airplanes. I was wondering about the following,
-Is the idea of plotting practical? I'm not at all concerned with the plotting time, but mainly size fidelity.
-Can one just "print" and send the plan to the cutter/plotter?
-Plans will be in jpg, pdf, possibly dxf, is it possible to tile plot one side then the other for jobs which are larger than the width of the machine. How about just a portion?
Sorry for all the questions and thanks!
From: Rodney Gold (RODNEY_GOLD) [#2]
14 Sep 2005
To: sfsjkid [#1] 15 Sep 2005
They work just fine , you can get a pen holder instead of the blade holder. In fact the cutters grew up from plotters. Most cutter software will come with a tiling setup.
You will need vector based stuff for plotting , a jpg will be difficult as you would have to produce a vector trace of it. DXF will be fine and so will PDF so long as the mebeded image in the PDF is a vector based one.
We often use our large format printer/vinyl cutter to produce templates for erecting cut letters , we do one of 2 things , either let the printhead print on paper or change the blade holder to a pen one and plot it (small stuff is quicker to actually print and the ability to print DOES handle jpegs or non vector based stuff)
Our machine is a print and cut machine.
From: sfsjkid [#3]
15 Sep 2005
To: ALL
Rodney, thank you for the quick reply! It does make sense that plotter would need vector based graphics, I should have realized that. I see myself forever converting jpgs etc to vector so I will probably get a smaller cutter and a slightly wider injet. Appreciate the nudge in the right direction!
Regards,
Frank