1. Week 02

This week I worked on getting used to this documentation process and using the vinyl cutter

Inkscape and Vinyl Cutters

Inkscape is a great vector drawing software. I would like to use it for Vinyl and Laser Cutting. But the cutters we use has it´s own proprietary software called Silhouette Studio. It would be good to use the svg file format for importing images,but the free version (schools have no money) of Silhouette Studio only allows you to import dxf file format. And that format does funny things when importing/exporting between software. Here is an example where the original dxf from Inkscape (left) changed size when imported into Silhouette Studio (right). The Inkscape circle has diameter 50mm, the silhouette studio circle has 61.86mm!

A colleague of mine told me about a Silhouette plugin for Inkscape. I haven´t been able to test it yet but maybe some of the other students have: https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette

So I wanted to make a multi-colored image to be thermo-pressed on a T-shirt but was forced to use Inkscape , just because it has better tools than Silhouette Studio. I then imported it in Silhouette Studio and had the right proportions scaled with a factor 0.xx. That could be a workaround to avoid the limitations of the proprietary software but it´s a bit tricky, not so precise and easy to make mistakes.