Lee DeRaud
04-09-2012, 8:15 PM
(I'm going to feel very stupid if it turns out everybody already knows this...:p)
Something that has bugged me from Day One is the way the Y-axis in Corel doesn't match the way my ULS VL200 works. The VL200 has its origin in the far left corner as you face the machine, with Y+ pointing 'down' toward the front. The Corel page setup, at least as of X4, can't really handle that: you can put the origin upper-left (0,12 on the origin setup tab), but then all your Y coordinates are negative. That's how it was set up on delivery, and that's how it looks in the setup documentation. Fast-forward through seven years of me grumbling every time I forget to type in the minus-sign when entering a coordinate and having something disappear off the top of the page...
It turns out that if you set up Corel with normal Cartesian coordinates (i.e. origin at 0,0 lower-left), Corel, the printer driver, and/or the firmware are smart enough to map the Corel page to the device "page" properly. Things on the lower-right of the screen (0,16 in Corel coordinates) end up on the front-right corner of the material (12,16 in laser coordinates), with everything oriented on the cuts the same way it is on the screen. Now the only mismatch is that the Y ruler on the laser table is backwards, but I never use that except as an offset measurement...and it isn't there on the cutting table anyway, which is what I use 90% of the time.
The odd bit is that you can load an existing drawing, change the origin, and nothing moves. Apparently Corel's internal coordinate system is fixed to some corner of the page and always uses the same orientation, regardless of how you diddle the page layout settings.
(Filed under "information that would have been useful to know at the time".:mad:)
Something that has bugged me from Day One is the way the Y-axis in Corel doesn't match the way my ULS VL200 works. The VL200 has its origin in the far left corner as you face the machine, with Y+ pointing 'down' toward the front. The Corel page setup, at least as of X4, can't really handle that: you can put the origin upper-left (0,12 on the origin setup tab), but then all your Y coordinates are negative. That's how it was set up on delivery, and that's how it looks in the setup documentation. Fast-forward through seven years of me grumbling every time I forget to type in the minus-sign when entering a coordinate and having something disappear off the top of the page...
It turns out that if you set up Corel with normal Cartesian coordinates (i.e. origin at 0,0 lower-left), Corel, the printer driver, and/or the firmware are smart enough to map the Corel page to the device "page" properly. Things on the lower-right of the screen (0,16 in Corel coordinates) end up on the front-right corner of the material (12,16 in laser coordinates), with everything oriented on the cuts the same way it is on the screen. Now the only mismatch is that the Y ruler on the laser table is backwards, but I never use that except as an offset measurement...and it isn't there on the cutting table anyway, which is what I use 90% of the time.
The odd bit is that you can load an existing drawing, change the origin, and nothing moves. Apparently Corel's internal coordinate system is fixed to some corner of the page and always uses the same orientation, regardless of how you diddle the page layout settings.
(Filed under "information that would have been useful to know at the time".:mad:)