Rastering small words into wood?

[Allan Longson]

Looking for some clues as to how others may have got good quality, like clearly readable, letters etched into wood in a SMALL font size - font size 8 and under. Using a VLS 6.60, Corel X7, latest drivers, new top quality optics, new laser cartridge, new belts, 2" focus, etching into a rimu veener.
With a true type font like arial and a font size of 8 I can't get small letters to etch clearly into a wood surface. I've tried throughput settings 5, 6 and 7 (high quality) with mixes of speed and power. At 5, the letters etch but if you have letters like an I or an l, these type of letters do not etch properly (are faint or not properly etched). At 7, the letters etch but the etch is too deep and you then end up with letters losing their definition as the etch borders run into each other because of the shape of laser beam. At 6 you get both situations happening. Adjusting the speed and power up and down doesn't change the end result, either the letters do not clearly etch or the etch is too deep. What I can't get is a shallow etch that is clear for every letter. It's even worse if one uses a fancy font like Shelley Allegro, the thin lines in the font just do not etch properly unless the power is high or quality is high (and therefore a really deep etch).
I'm etching logos so the font, size etc has to closely match the writing on the logos and I can't upsize or stretch the font. I have experimented with different fonts and the whilst the problem varies in how bad it shows up, it is there for every font I have tried.
So can anyone recommend a setting for power / speed / quality or any other of the raster settings or is this just an inherent laser problem that as you go smaller the quality falls away? Maybe if I convert the letters to a bit map so it takes out any font driver issues with either Corel or Universal?

[Scott Shepherd]

Have you tuned your laser lately? If not, you need to go through the tuning process. There's no reason it shouldn't do what you want it to do. My guess is your tuning is off. There's a canned cycle for doing that, you just open up that area, put some material in and follow the steps.

[Lee DeRaud]

Maybe if I convert the letters to a bit map so it takes out any font driver issues with either Corel or Universal?Doing "convert to curves" on the text objects will handle that directly in Corel and still allow you to scale the overall drawing.

But as Scott said, it should not be a problem. You say you're etching into veneer: how thick? I'm guessing when you say the etch is too deep, you mean it's blowing through to the substrate...that may just be the nature of the beast.

[Mike Null]

With your machine and optics I believe you should be able to engrave down to 3 or 4 point type sharply. I typically use 500 dpi as my resolution for engraving into wood. I don't know what that equates to on your machine. With script fonts you may have to outline them or convert to curves and manipulate them a bit. But first follow Steve's suggestion.

[Ross Moshinsky]

I can tell you with my VLS 6.60 60w with a newish tube and optics, if you want detail, you have to turn down the power. I engrave a decent amount of black/gold laser aluminum. When I first got the machine I'd run at 50pwr 100 speed, which would leave a brighter finish with less polishing. When doing this I found on detailed logos that I did easily on my LS100 30W, the ULS would look poor. Upon testing I found if I dialed the power way back to something like 12-15%, I'd get similar quality. Obviously this is indicative of more power = wider beam. My LS100 obviously puts out half the power of the ULS, but I've never suffered from this problem when changing the power from 10% to 100%. I think it's just one of the many "downsides" with the ULS machine.

So long story short, if you want to get detailed engraving, you may want to turn down the power and do two passes. 8 point font really isn't that small, but I'd still apply the same principle. Potentially slowing the machine from 100% to 85-90% could also make a decent difference.

[Kev Williams]

Should be no reason you can't get decent detail out of your Universal on wood--

For fun, I just did a test with all 3 of my lasers... and I just used a piece of 2 x 4 I had laying around...

Here's the pics, the whole piece and a closeup. First thing to notice is that even my 1300 x 900 Triumph 'cutting' machine
gave me reasonably good results at 5 points. Next, the first Explorer engraving below the Triumph's I did at 60% speed,
which was simply too fast. Also, I didn't position it correctly (oops), so I changed the speed to 25%, which would more
closely match the Triumph's depth. Note the triumph was running essentially the same speed as my 2 metal
machines, but got that deep at only 18% power. As usual, my LS900 wins the 'tightest beam spot' award, I know that
it has a beam collimator, and I assume it's a good one because this machine's always had a very tight beam spot.
My point being, if my machines can do it, even my dumpster-sized Triumph, your ULS should have no problem...
--and fwiw, my "600dpi" refers to LINES per inch, not DOTS per inch... :)

http://www.engraver1.com/erase2/woodtesta.jpg


http://www.engraver1.com/erase2/woodtest.jpg

[Yuriy Karpov]

if the material doesn't hold fine engravings well I'd just do a hairline outline of the engraving to sharpen it up.

[Bert Kemp]

When I was thinking about making a website for engraving I messed around with veneer trying to design a business card. this is very thin veneer probably 1 mm or less I did this at 30% pwr and 325 mmps speed on my 60 watt335265 So your machine should have no trouble

[Allan Longson]

Doing a hairline doesn't help if the middle isn't etched. I have tuned the laser, that did help with the sharpeness of the letters, thanks.
But the missing letters still occur. Here is an an example, this was etched at 15% power, 25% speed, 800dpi on level 7 (high quality), normal raster, manual adj off. Top and bottom lines etched ok but the ll in college on the middle row, it has just plain------ it up and it does this regardless of what settings I use. By recollection this was size 6 arial font. So you can see my despair, how can you trust the thing to etch a job you want done when it starts missing letters out. Going to send this off to my local rep and see what he thinks of it.

335267

[Lee DeRaud]

Doing a hairline doesn't help if the middle isn't etched. I have tuned the laser, that did help with the sharpeness of the letters, thanks.
But the missing letters still occur. Here is an an example, this was etched at 15% power, 25% speed, 800dpi on level 7 (high quality), normal raster, manual adj off. Top and bottom lines etched ok but the ll in college on the middle row, it has just plain f####d it up and it does this regardless of what settings I use. By recollection this was size 6 arial font. That's very odd...seems unlikely a hardware failure would be that specific. It's almost like the thing where a line gets changed from hairline to something wider, not enough to show on the screen, but enough to make the driver ignore it while vectoring. Or those two letters look black, but the color is enough off to make the driver think it's something else. Did all the text show up in the viewer/control-panel (can never remember what it's called) before you sent it to the laser?

Did you try the 'convert to curves' thing? As I recall, there were versions of the ULS printer driver that didn't like some flavors of font (i.e. TrueType vs PostScript vs whatever) but I thought they fixed that.

[Allan Longson]

The letters show up fine in the viewer prior to running the job. I thought of a possible colour issue and changed the colour of the font (from black rgb to green rgb) and rerun the job, same issue. I didn't know that the ULS printer driver had issues with flavours of font, maybe this is a carry over.
I haven't tried turning the text into an object yet, will give that a go next.

Also with regards to the pic posted, The same font copied elsewhere on the page and then rerun using a different setting eg image quality 6 with different speed and power, will sometimes print all the letters fine but sometimes not print all the letters fine. So that kind of eliminates colour issues, imho its a driver issue and hopefully ULS can shed some light on it.

[Kev Williams]

I have a question-- Have you tried using a different version or Corel? I ask because my BIL (who now owns my old ULS) has X6, and no matter what settings we've tried, or color palette changes, virtually ANY small text sent to the ULS from X6 engraves as if the laser beam changed into a hacksaw. Bumpy edges, lost detail, etc etc-- I believe I even posted up a question about this issue a year or so ago..? But send the exact same job over using X4, and the engraving is pristine. Since I bought the ULS in 2002 we've fed it via Corel 9, 10, x3, x4 and x6. All older versions, the engraving is fantastic. Totally clueless about why, since no one else has ever brought it up. Maybe we're not alone? If you have an older version of Corel, try it...

[Allan Longson]

Converted the text to curves, at the settings it fails on as text (throughput 7, power 15, speed 30) it also fails as a curve. So I take a rectangle, size it to the l, overlay the 2 l's, delete the 2 l's from the text, merge the objects and then reprint, volia, the l's (or rectangles as they now are) etch fine.

[Lee DeRaud]

I have a question-- Have you tried using a different version or Corel? I ask because my BIL (who now owns my old ULS) has X6, and no matter what settings we've tried, or color palette changes, virtually ANY small text sent to the ULS from X6 engraves as if the laser beam changed into a hacksaw. Bumpy edges, lost detail, etc etc-- I believe I even posted up a question about this issue a year or so ago..? But send the exact same job over using X4, and the engraving is pristine. Since I bought the ULS in 2002 we've fed it via Corel 9, 10, x3, x4 and x6. All older versions, the engraving is fantastic. Totally clueless about why, since no one else has ever brought it up. Maybe we're not alone? If you have an older version of Corel, try it...Oh great...I just realized I haven't engraved any text since I "upgraded" from X4 to X7. :eek:

[Lee DeRaud]

So I take a rectangle, size it to the l, overlay the 2 l's, delete the 2 l's from the text, merge the objects and then reprint, volia, the l's (or rectangles as they now are) etch fine.I'm glad you have a solution, but we're no closer to determining the root cause of the problem, especially since there are two identical(?) l's in the next line down that work fine as text: need to figure out what's different between those two lines of text.

[Mike Null]

As I look at the example you posted it is clear that the substrate is part of your issue in terms of achieving a sharp clear engraving. The finish on the wood is coarse and is likely burning at various rates so clarity is going to be difficult. I believe you are overpowering the job.

I doubt that Corel is the issue. Arial is a go to font for most of my label work and it has never failed through 4 different versions of Corel.

I had a 1997 ULS and from time to time I ran into a communication issue between the pc and the engraver which produced somewhat similar results. In almost all cases it was a cable issue. Removing and reconnecting the cable and re-sending the file seemed to solve the problem though it would reveal itself days or weeks later.

[Kev Williams]

I found my old thread about Don's issue, from December 2013-- http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?210832-Corel-16-vs-14-and-13-engraving-quality&highlight=X6+problem

-below is a copy/paste of my original post. Note, this image was never cleaned up, and the height is a little over an inch so it's not particularly small. To my knowledge, Don has never found a cure for it.


My BIL who works with me has Corel 13, 14 and 16. He LOVES working with 16, but it won't render decent engraving. I'll cut to the chase:

Below is a picture of two identical graphics, on identical pieces of Rowmark, lasered at identical settings. The only difference is the top was sent to the engraver using Corel 14, the bottom sent using Corel 16:


http://www.engraver1.com/erase1/Corel14-16.jpg


--We have no clue why this is happening or what to do to fix it, and I guess neither does anyone at Corel CS. While this grid pattern may work great on glass (haven't tried it yet) it's terrible on pretty much everything else!

All prior versions of Corel engrave fine, it only does this with version 16...

He has a Gravograph LS800 at his home, and I think it does the same thing on that machine too, which tells me it's not a driver issue. Haven't tried it on my LS900.

Is there some secret to this we're not finding?

[Chris DeGerolamo]

below is a copy/paste of my original post. Note, this image was never cleaned up, and the height is a little over an inch so it's not particularly small. To my knowledge, Don has never found a cure for it.

Easy: coloring went to CMYK - needs to go back to RGB.

[Bert Kemp]

Thats an awful lot of work to get a letter I and not a very good solution to the problem, quick fix to get a job out OK but I would contact UVL and get this problem fixed the right way.


Converted the text to curves, at the settings it fails on as text (throughput 7, power 15, speed 30) it also fails as a curve. So I take a rectangle, size it to the l, overlay the 2 l's, delete the 2 l's from the text, merge the objects and then reprint, volia, the l's (or rectangles as they now are) etch fine.

[Lee DeRaud]

Oh great...I just realized I haven't engraved any text since I "upgraded" from X4 to X7. :eek:Ok, that's a bit of a relief: I just did a quick test in X7, default settings, Arial (OpenType). No pics, since my camera sucks at macro, but on MDF it looks good down to 3pt. (That's under my big magnifier, since my eyeball's macro mode isn't any better than my camera's.)

Allan - Any chance you can upload the file for the picture in post #9 (the failed version)? This is looking more and more like something wrong with the file and/or Corel's parsing of it...wouldn't hurt to see if it's the file itself, your X7 installation/settings, or something more global.

[Allan Longson]

I agree that the Rosehill and possibly the web address is overpowered but that is not of my doing. The fonts etch at different depths, the Rosehill is the deepest, then the web address and the college is the lightest. If I was to get them to all etch at the same depth as things stand at the moment, I would need to run 3 separate jobs etching each line at different powers. Is this normal for lasers? They are 3 different fonts but I am struggling to understand why the laser is treating them differently.
This isn't a new problem for me, I had this when using X6 and etching fancy fonts and parts of the font wouldn't etch clearly particularly the thin lines leading to and from the letters. I do have Corel 12 and XP on a backup machine, I will have to dig it out of storage and see if I get any different results. Unfortunately I don't have any other version of Corel I can try.

I'll try a plug and unplug of the cable. The driver is the latest, I have to reinstall it every time Win10 updates because (and acknowledge by ULS) they have an issue with this but the cause is unknown and intermittent.....

[Lee DeRaud]

I agree that the Rosehill and possibly the web address is overpowered but that is not of my doing. The fonts etch at different depths, the Rosehill is the deepest, then the web address and the college is the lightest. If I was to get them to all etch at the same depth as things stand at the moment, I would need to run 3 separate jobs etching each line at different powers. Is this normal for lasers? They are 3 different fonts but I am struggling to understand why the laser is treating them differently.Eh? A given color (or more to the point, gray level) at a given power should etch to the same depth regardless of font. Are all three lines of text pure black (RGB 0:0:0)?

Did you get that file from someone else or import it from DXF or some other format? It really sounds like there's something odd in there that may not show up when viewed on-screen.

[Allan Longson]

The words are part of a logo I am etching onto coasters. I start with the logo as the template and then recreate all of the letters so the clarity and sharpness comes thru from using a tt font instead of etched from a jpeg file that the customer sent me. So the letters are from scratch, created using the font tool in Corel and sized to match what they are in the logo. For the results I posted, when I ran the job I wanted to remove any possible interference so I started with a blank page, created the 3 lines of text and then sent them to the laser. Yes, they are all 3 lines of rgb black, 0: 0: 0: I then changed the colour to 3 lines of rgb green 0: 255: 0, same result. Different fonts etch at different depths and the ll's are missing.

[Kev Williams]

Easy: coloring went to CMYK - needs to go back to RGB.
Color is RGB, even the Corel techs verified it. All colors and all palettes, the results are the same...

[Allan Longson]

Lee - what file would you need, the corel file or the ULS print file? And what would you need to know about the X7 installation / settings or would this be in the corel file?
Thanks all for any help on this, my local agent has been next to useless imho. His only answer is you need to use the image controls (contrast, definition, density) which I accept could be relevant if all of the letters were failing but he has no answer as to why all the other letters printed out fine and the ll's in college failed.

[Lee DeRaud]

Different fonts etch at different depths and the ll's are missing.But the ll's are missing on only one of the three (very similar) fonts, right? If you use the font from the URL (third line) on the second line, what happens?

(As I mentioned before, it would really help if we had the actual file that fails for you, to see if anyone else can reproduce the error and thus help isolate it.)

[Lee DeRaud]

Lee - what file would you need, the corel file or the ULS print file? And what would you need to know about the X7 installation / settings or would this be in the corel file?
Thanks all for any help on this, my local agent has been next to useless imho. His only answer is you need to use the image controls (contrast, definition, density) which I accept could be relevant if all of the letters were failing but he has no answer as to why all the other letters printed out fine and the ll's in college failed.Ah, our posts crossed in the web...

We need the Corel file that failed, and maybe the exact font files you used if they are not Windows-standard (Win7 in my case) or installed by X7. The ULS print file might be useful, although I'm not sure how running it on different machines with different firmware/driver versions would affect the results. My gut tells me your problem is higher up, at the Corel or font file level.

[Mike Null]

Lee

Have you ruled out a corrupted file or communication issue?

[Lee DeRaud]

Lee

Have you ruled out a corrupted file or communication issue?Uh, I'm not the one having problems. When I get something from Allan, I'll see if I can reproduce it.

From what we've been told, comm issue is unlikely...I'm leaning toward corrupted Corel or font file.

[Allan Longson]

Ok, I will set up a drop box and put the cdr file in there (unless you can suggest a better way), is it ok in X7 or should I save it in an earlier version? The fonts used are arial, avalon and avantgard, the last 2 I downloaded from ufonts and they installed fine on Win10 but I don't know if they are Win7 specific.
If the letters always failed to print out then I would agree that it is a font issue but having tried dozens of different laser print settings in testing this, sometimes all letters print fine (but not consistently every job) and other times the letters don't, this is why I discounted a font or corel issue because the print job never changed, only the laser settings would change. Maybe something in the font is on the edge which means it sometimes etches ok and sometimes doesn't, I would actually hope this is the case because at least this can be addressed but if the problem lies at the ULS end then I wouldn't hold out much hope for a quick fix.

[Bert Kemp]

version 9 or below so more people can see it and help, also just insert file here if not to big

[Lee DeRaud]

version 9 or below so more people can see it and help, also just insert file here if not to bigAll that does is introduce more variables: we need to reproduce his problem, which is with X7.

[Bert Kemp]

Well that will limit who can help sorry id didn't think of that


All that does is introduce more variables: we need to reproduce his problem, which is with X7.

[Mike Null]

Lee,

I was merely seeking your opinion as you seem to have some expertise on the matter.

[Lee DeRaud]

I was merely seeking your opinion as you seem to have some expertise on the matter.As with most things, any perceived expertise on my part is only what Jerry Pournelle used to call "the relentless application of logic". :cool:

[Allan Longson]

Ok, I've narrowed the problem down to an issue with the ULS driver not behaving as it should at certain settings eg:

Throughput = 4, Image enhancement disabled, print is NOT OK for certain fonts
Throughput = 4, Image enhancement manual, print is ok (font is fat even with very low settings for contrast)
Throughput = 5, Image enhancement disabled, print is ok
Throughput = 5, Image enhancement manual, print is ok (font is fat even with very low settings for contrast)
Throughput = 7, Image enhancement disabled, print is NOT OK for certain fonts
Throughput = 7, Image enhancement manual, print is ok (font is fat even with very low settings for contrast)

I have always had image enhancement disabled because I've found that fonts print out truer to shape this way. With the logo I am doing I wanted it a little bit finer so chose quality over throughput and this is when the driver screws up and only with certain fonts. The local agent can't explain it because if it was a tuning issue I should get the same issue at any throughput with any font when image enhancement is disabled.

So thanks for your help folks, persistence at experimenting with many different settings and combinations has got me a work around.
For reference, the 1st line was Avalon bold, the 2nd Avantgarde, the 3rd Arial. The 2nd and 3rd lines would have print issues but the 1st line never did, I suspect this is because it was bold (I haven't bothered trying to replicate faults for this font at normal).

[Mark Taylor2]

Windows 10? Can you try this on a Windows 7 machine? I'm hearing that Windows 10 is still having driver issues in that they are either non-existent or there's issues with them. Supposedly the big release coming up in July (it's the "Anniversary" release so I think it's July) will fix most of the driver issues.

[Allan Longson]

Unfortunately I don't have a Win7 machine I can try it on after upgrading everything to Win10. I do have an XP machine with an older version of Coral on it in storage (backup system) so will dig it out, update the driver and then try and see if I can replicate the issue. It will be a couple of days before I get to it.
Looking forward to a Win10 fix, having to reinstall the ULS driver every time Windows updates is a pita.

[Keith Colson]

Hi Allan

I am in Auckland and have the exact same machine. If you want to drop around sometime with your Corel file we can have a play here is you are interested. I have been doing very fine engraving on this machine for quite a while. e.g. circuit boards etc. You can find my details by googling "edns group"