I’m honestly not sure where the problem lies; could be in Corel 5, dxftool or in sheetcam (or more likely in user, lol).
What happens is this: I take a piece of artwork that is in BMP format, open it using Corel, use dxftool to convert to export as dxf and then try to open in Sheetcam. When I go to open it in sheetcam, there isn’t anything there, it shows opening the file, but there is nothing showing. So, I looked at the file size and the dxf files I created are only 185 bytes each. I do have the item in the active window in Corel and I use select all to select the object prior to using the dxftool export option. Just can’t figure this one out
Sorry to take up anyone’s time, but does anybody have any idea what I’m doing wrong here?
SheetCam cannot cut a bitmap image and going by the file size Corel didn’t even include the image in the dxf file. The problem with bitmap images is that they don’t contain good outline data. They are just a series of dots. If you zoom in on a bitmap image you will see the individual dots.
SheetCam needs the drawing in a vector format. Instead of dots, vector drawings are a description of the drawing. For instance a bitmap line would be a row of dots. A vector line would be a description of that line including position, size etc. In Corel it is fairly easy to trace the bitmap drawing using the drawing tools. Alternatively you can use a bitmap to vector conversion program such as CorelTrace to automatically convert the drawing. Note that these programs have to make a lot of assumptions and guesses about the image so often the traced outlines are inaccurate or don’t cut well. You generally end up doing quite a lot of cleanup work afterwards.