Turbocab / Corel imcompatability

[Mitchell Andrus]

I have a Laserpro Spirit 60W and use their off the shelf driver, and Corel X3.

A friend emailed a Turbocad 12 file to see if I could cut it, and stopped over to see the machine in action. I opened it in Turbocad 11(.dwg), saved it as a .wmf so I could work on it in Corel. The file consists of a few curves, and about 20 straight lines, nothing fancy.

I opened the .wmf file in Corel X3 and attempted to print it. The laser got the file, but the panel showed some settings that didn't relate to the settings I set with the driver and refused to cut it.

We deleted parts of the drawing one by one until the file made it into the laser OK, and turned our attention to the parts of the drawing that were causing the problem. I don't know what caused the sytem to vomit the files back at us - there must be somthing in the way Turbocad makes lines that get mutated somehow when they are opened or processed in Corel. Funny thing is, some lines cause a problem, some don't.

We tried to print straight from Turbocad - HA! Does anyone do this? How?

So, anyone game for a little timewaster??? The files are below.

Don't spend too much time here, it isn't a critical job. It was kinda fun to see just how far we could go before calling it a night.

Mitch

[Rodne Gold]

The dwg file imports 100% into X3.

[Dave Jones]

The DWG imported for me also in X3, but didn't look anything like the WMF or what the DWG looks like in AutoCad (I don't have TurboCAD).

I didn't try lasering it, but the curved shape on the right looks odd in X3 when I import the WMF. It has open shapes with outlines in one shape and fill in another right on top of each other. Both have virtexes on top of each other and overlapping, making strange shaped lines.

Looking at the original DWG in AutoCAD I see that the rectangular boxes are made of polylines with zero width. And the curved shape on the right is made from polylines also. The arc and lines on the left, which look fine in X3 are made from an arc and lines in AutoCAD. If the problem lines are the ones that are polylines, maybe redoing the original using arcs to create the shape on the right and lines to make the boxes might help.

[Lee DeRaud]

The DWG imported fine: looks just like the final CDR Mitch ended up with, except for a couple extra objects (26 vs 23). The curve appears to be doubled, like it was a trace around a thick original line...would probably cut and/or engrave ok, but certainly not optimal.

The WMF looks...very odd. The segments that make up the curve appear to be several different widths. Zooming in, looks like chunks of it loop back over itself or something.

Bottom line, looks like the problem is that TurboCad doesn't export to WMF worth beans.

[Dave Jones]

Ahhhh.... "import". OK. I had tried just opening the DWG in X3 and that did not go so well. The objects were way off to the left and when selected and moved onto the screen they were all in the wrong relative positions. I just tried import and that did work fine.

[Mitchell Andrus]

Yep. I'm hearing you all are having the same problems we had... Curves that are made up of wavy overlapping 'stuff'.... etc. The other problem was that the scale of the original didn't translate to Corel worth beans.

Thanks, all. Seems like offering to cut stuff generated in .dwg is a bad idea, for now. Too bad.

Mitch

[Dave Jones]

Importing the DWG didn't have any wavy overlapping lines. And the scaling could be solved by him drawing a box around everything with a known size, which you use for scale and then delete.