lightburn vs rdworks

[Terry Wade]

I'm interested in LightBurn and want to know how things work if I want to import a RDW file, I have quite a number of client files that constantly use over and over, I assume I would just need to export from RDW in a DXF file and import into LightBurn. Does this transfer well or am I just going to have to recreate the files?

[Doug Fisher]

The workflow is generally like that. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure RDWorks only exports to Adobe .ai and .plt file formats, not .dxf. With that said, at least for fairly simple files, LightBurn has imported both the .ai and .plt files created in RDWorks just fine.

RDWorks' handicap importing and exporting file formats is one of the primary reasons I moved to LightBurn as soon as LightBurn became polished enough to be viable. RDWorks fails so often when it comes to importing and exporting common file formats.

[Mike Thornbury]

LightBurn reads dxf great, but I can’t say how well rdworks exports it.

[Terry Wade]

Another thought about LightBurn does it play well with Corel Draw and can it be used as a replacement for the EZ Cad that comes with the fiber laser? I am looking into the fiber laser in the very near future.

[Kev Williams]

Running a galvo fiber laser is night/day different that running a gantry laser, so Lightburn can't replace EzCad as a way to actually run the laser. However, with EzCad, like with other Chinese software such as RDworks, LaserCad, LaserSoft etc, you simply do most of your actual graphics layout in a good graphics program like Corel or AI, and simply import it into EzCad to run it. The caveat with using EzCad is that it is fairly necessary to learn how to use text, because it does have some good variable text and rotary text routines. I've gotten quite used to EzCad, and the newer versions have some very nice features the older versions don't have, like an optional large window for text entry, being able to jog the graphic while it's redlighting, ignoring hatch fill during contour redlighting, auto cross-hatching in each hatch routine, 1-click contour redlighting instead of 5-clicks... etc..

[Doug Fisher]

Oz has a fiber and has indicated he hopes to support fiber in the future. He has to get LB fully functional and out of beta for CO2 lasers first though so I wouldn't count on fiber support in the very near future.