Corel Draw question

[John Heavill]

Referring to the attached photo, is it easily possible in Corel Draw to join type and a shape (top image) so as to laser cut both as one piece (bottom image)?
Thanks in advance for any and all info.

John H.

[Richard Rumancik]

Sure. Convert the rectangle and text to curves. Then weld them all together. (You could select one piece and weld each part incrementally.) I'm sure there are other ways.

EDIT: actually, if you haven't broken each letter apart, then it treats the text line as a single entity and it is very quick. Once you have your Shaping docker running, with WELD selected, click the rectangle, click WELD TO, then the text. But it will also allow you to weld more pieces like vector shapes etc. All the shapes should be outlined with no fill.

[Bill Jermyn]

Does this help?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4uo_nRB4Ho

[Mike Null]

Actually it's not necessary to convert to curves as that is done automatically by the weld action.
The arrow points to the weld tool which you can add to your toolbar.

Select both items and weld as shown in 1. The result is shown in 2.

[Richard Rumancik]

Mike is correct, you don't actually have to convert the text and rectangle to curves first - I did not know that. Bill's method in the video uses the contour operation on the text, which you may want to use if you need to "fatten" the letters up. But you can just use the standard character outline instead (with no fill) if the letters are already the weight you need.

John - one point about your example - you do end up with some thin vertical lines which may be fragile. Depends on what this will be used for. But sometimes it is necessary to thicken or edit specific sections to make it "manufacturable" and/or look better.

To do this, just take the welded shape, select it with the pick (arrow) tool. All the nodes will be shown as little rectangles. Then click the "shape tool" and drag/move any nodes to improve on the image as need be.

[John Heavill]

Thanks all for your help in this.

John H.