can this file be fixed in corel x5?

[trucks1948]

every once in a while i run into a file like this ,with double lines and lots of segments.Is there anyway to make this cutable in corel or do i just need to trace it?Thanks Jim

[muzza]

That drawing was made up of lots of like boxes to form a lot of outlines so what I did was fill it which filled all the little boxes and saved as a bmp file and then imported that file back in and did a centreline trace in Corel X5, then saved as the dxf here.

maltese 33 trace.dxf

[trucks1948]

Thanks for the information.I've been fighting those for a while.Jim

[trucks1948]

Ok, i am used to filling closed objects ,but i can't fill all these boxes that aren't hooked toghther.What tool or actions are you using to fill this?Thanks Jim

[muzza]

All I did was select the entire drawing and left click on the black palette (fill). This filled the little boxes to create solid enough lines to export as a bmp to do a centreline trace on.

I had another similar situation on one I did last night where a customer had drawn a design on a beer box in felt pen. I took a photo of the design and then did a Corel centre line trace which left a broken line, I then reduced the image size quite a bit, used the join curves, converted to a dxf and then stretched it back out and reduced nodes to smooth it out. Still had to do a bit of work but much quicker than me tracing from scratch.

Until I did that one for you yesterday I had never tried either of these methods before, I just looked at the problem and thought "how am I going to do this?" I do that a lot but it's not often I get two in a row that work but it's all part of the learning curve. I love using Corel and find with just playing around with problems and all the help from here that I'm slowly getting more confident all the time. I still have a long way to go though.

Murray

[Gamelord]

As Muzza has said but there is a few steps that will make this easier.

1) Open in Corel
2) Select the entire object
3) Left click on the "Black" color swatch to fill all the little squares so they are solid black and not outlines.
4) From the top menu, select "Bitmaps" and then down to "Convert To Bitmap.." This will convert the entire drawing to a BMP image that will eliminate all the little boxes and lines and make one solid line.
5) With the object still selected, size it down smaller so the lines are a little smoother (about 1/4 the original size).
6) Again, from the top menu, select "Bitmaps" and then down to "Outline Trace" and then select "Line Art".
7) Adjust till you get a good trace in the preview, be sure that "Group objects by color" is checked, then hit "OK"
8) Move the new Vector image away from the original (if you did not have "Delete Original" Selected).
9) With the new image selected, go to "Arrange" then to "Ungroup" (NOT ungroup all).
10) Press "CTRL+A" to select everything on the page (all). Then press and hold the "Shift" key while clicking ONLY on the black outline (de-selecting the black outline image), then press "Delete". This will remove everything on the page except the black outline, removing any possible duplicate objects. Do this even if nothing else appears visible. A white object on a white background will not show up but your cutter will try to cut it.
11) Review the new item, size it as needed and make sure it is ok to export and cut.

Total time to make this file a cut-able DXF....about 4 minutes.

Hope that helps.

[muzza]

Thanks Gamelord, like I say, I just keep learning thanks to the help on here.
Murray

[SignTorch Vector Art]

that is due to the dxf containing polylines with non-zero width, and corel then draws each segment as a rectangle of the same width, rather than as a line segment as it should be

in this case all polylines have the same start and end width of 0.017394 so you can open the dxf file in a text editor and do a global search/replace to change 0.017394 to 0

in the dxf file it looks like this

40
0.017394
41
0.017394

40 means start width and 41 means end width

so the goal is to make it look like this

40
0
41
0

in some cases blindly replacing the 0.017394 with 0 could cause problems if the same value appears elsewhere in the file, so it'd be best to use a good text editor that can replace only those values that follow a 40 or 41 code on a new line

another way would be to open the dxf in a CAD program and change the polyline width to zero and resave the dxf

and, when posting DXF files, make sure all polyline geometry has zero width, for corel users' sake

[trucks1948]

Thanks for all the help guys,thats what makes this site so great.