Rastering small words into wood?

[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/showthre...ght=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:





--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.

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.