Boo

[WastedHippy]

Hi Folks

hope to be taking delivery of a LS3020 in the next 48 hours so thought I best say hi on here before I start with the dumb questions over the next week or so while learning the ropes.

I've been working with Photoshop for years and although I've not done anything involving vector and raster I'm pretty on the ball with the software. Am I good to stay with that and my knowledge there or would a crash course in CorelDraw pay off in the long term? To start with I'm looking at text engraving and cutting of engraving laminate so nothing too complicated I hope.

Thanks in advance.

Paul

[Spooky]

Hiya Paul,

Photoshop is good but not for laser use really, try Draftsite from Dassult Systems (it's free) or any other cad based package if you want a paid one. Corel is ok but can cause some legacy issues with splines and vectors in general ( I don't use it because of this) but will do the job if your a fan of Corel software.

Above all, welcome to the madhouse

DaveN is your man for 3020 questions

best wishes

Dave

[Daven]

Hi Paul,

Welcome to the steep but fun learning curve!

As Dave said DraftSight or DoubleCad (also free) will become your main tool for cutting although Newlydraw that you get with the 3020 does a fair job of simple shapes. The laminate sign I posted earlier was done completely in ND!

Just been talking to PhillyDee about the fact I will be stocking A4 sheets of different coloured laminates soon so keep an eye out here

Cheers

Dave

[PhillyDee]

My procedure:

Draftsite for cutting
I then use Coreldraw for doing complex fonts, anything which requires any sort of fancy text, such as waves, angled, circular text etc. This gets spat out as a JPG and is ideal for engraving. I also use Coreldraw to output some dxf files, but not much, mostly done on CAD.

Basic stuff is done in Newlydraw. Its good for getting fancy cornered signs and basic text. Would recommend you hover over the menu option as it transalted the chinese looking symbols .

Few odds and ends in here:
http://www.laserscript.co.uk/phpBB3/vie ... ?f=9&t=344

I compiled it quickly, so its not completely complete :0
Materials and suppliers are in here: http://www.laserscript.co.uk/phpBB3/vie ... ?f=9&t=294 Again, not exhaustive, there is a lot of stuff from Hobarts to add, I will do it next week!

[WastedHippy]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll have a play with Newlydraw and find the limitations on that 1st, more than likely that will do what I'm looking to do initially by the sounds of it, walk 1st, run later if I don't fall over

You can't beat a good forum, suppliers can only help so much where they're not using the machines themselves and only there during office hours so it's handy to have a knowledge base to dig through for those really dumb questions like how do I turn it on

Cheers
Paul