Corel Question # 502335

[Brian Robison]

Hi Creekers,
Seems I've had a problem with this in the past.
You have a Corel drawing that has a black out line around a colored object. I wasn't drawn by you and you
are changing things so that it lasers better. The problem
is it's not really a black outline, it's a black blob covered with the colored object to look like an outline. You change the color to white.When you laser it the now white blob over the black blob is now just a big black blobby mess. Any tricks to fix this situation?

[Joe Pelonio]

What kind of file was it when sent to you? Some sort of bitmap, no doubt. I would suggest trying a trace on the original black blob, then run a neagative contour on it to get a line that matches up with the "outline", and change the thickness to what you need.

[Brian Robison]

Hi Joe,
It's an .eps in a nice vector format that I'm working on
now but most of the ones I deal with are Corel drawings
sent to me. I think they are assembled from clip art.

[Joe Pelonio]

If it's a vector file, then just select no fill and set the outline width on the inner blob.

[Brian Robison]

It doesn't exactly follow the shape of the inner blob.
I'm not crazy am I? Would my laser try to laser the black under the white?

[Dee Gallo]

Brian,

I hate it when that happens, which is why I generally avoid clipart and the trace feature because it creates drawings like that too. Unfortunately, the alternative is to hand draw the whole thing. But I find 10-15 minutes doing the drawing on top of the locked original image is faster than playing around with ungroup, reshaping, cutting apart, welding, change fill, make/remove outline, etc. and ending up with cr*p anyway.

You can spend hours dealing with weird nodes and shapes connected in odd ways, or you can just do the drawing yourself. That's been my experience anyway.

cheers, dee

[Joe Pelonio]

If it's completely covered with white, anything below will not engrave. I often use a white shape with no outline to cover up something to engrave only part of an image. A lot faster than editing a bitmap to remove the part you don't want.

On the other hand, if you are also cutting out a shape, the hairlines underneath and hidden from view will cut.

[Brian Robison]

OK then, I'll deal with it. Probably just size it right and change to a bitmap. I hate that! I thought maybe I was missing something ( ie. combine or who knows.)
Thanks gang!