If a large portion of your source material is going to be PDF, you need either a drawing program that can extract the content of a PDF, open it as objects native to the drawing program, and then export it as an exchange format (EPS) that the cutter-driving software can open or a cutter-driving software that can open the content of a PDF. You'll still need to be able to manipulate the paths.īottom like: It's rather self-defeating to try to operate vinyl cutting equipment (I'm assuming vinyl-you don't specify) without a program that can manipulate paths. So just 'converting' one meta format to another is like dumping the content of one cardboard box into another. They are like 'wrappers' or 'boxes' which can contain any combination of raster images, vector paths, and live text. Those programs typically require EPS just because EPS was established as the normal exchange format for Bezier curves described in the PostScript language. Such programs often provide the tools necessary to manipulate Bezier paths, albeit often with more cumbersome and limited drawing tools.

Most sign vinyl cutting equipment users drive the device with a more vertical-market (i.e. In short, you need something more than just a translation of a PDF to an EPS file. Vector drawings (especially AI artwork) not drawn expressly for the purpose of cutting will very often contain cross-cuts and overlaps that you'll need to remove before cutting. Unless you are working in a closed environment with a set of PDFs, the content of which is known, you are almost certainly going to need to modifiy the content in order to make it suitable for plotter cutting.

Export images inkscape eps