DXF Help Needed

[sfrsdavis]

Anyone have better luck than me converting this to DXF? The letters aren't right after tracing in inkscape

[lklassen331]

Try this out...

plasma conversion.DXF

[rdj357]

The original was too small and low resolution to get a decent trace. It's such simple shapes and text I just redrew it real quick.

tracehelp.dxf

[sfrsdavis]

"redrew it real quick" ha not in my vocabulary yet. Thanks so much!! What programs do You use?

[rdj357]

I hear ya, it took me about 5 minutes after years of practice!

I use DesignEdge Advanced Design which is a PlasmaCam exclusive but Inkscape is free and capable I just don't know all the tricks and shortcuts for it. CorelDraw is one of the best purchased programs for CAD work and Adobe Illustrator is good as well.

It may or may not help to explain what I did because I really do a smash up of all the software I have to get things done. I use VinylMaster CutPRO that came with my vinyl plotter to do a trace because it has some fine tuning settings that are easy to use and get a good trace. I traced your file with that and got a pretty decent outline of the graphic but the text was a hot mess as you found out I'm sure. Then I imported that dxf into DesignEdge and made new text with Arial Black as it was a near perfect match. I scaled the text by matching up to an old letter and making them the same, then put that to the side. I found the center of the circles and drew new perfect circles to replace the others. The triangle shape was very clean from the trace so I made an offset copy the same distance as the gap around it from the old drawing and then trimmed my new clean circles to be the same as the old ones and deleted the old. Now I had a clean design with bad text. I drew a circle about centerline of the old text and then broke it apart at the ends of the text. Used 'fit text to path' to evenly space the text to those curves and then zoomed in to move and rotate the individual letters to be as close to the same as the original as possible and then deleted the old letters leaving the nice new ones in their spot. I drew a star (DesignEdge can create them easily) and sized it to match the old messy star and did the same with them as the text, placed them over the old and then deleted the old. That left it all new drawing and paths with nice sharp lines and no distortions from tracing.