Cutting on the Versalaser from Inventor 2011

[jkies]

Hello,
I am a teacher in Iowa, and we have the VLS 4.6 and Corel X4. I am trying to print from Inventor 2011 .dwg files to the laser without going through Corel. I have been successful in etching, but I can't cut. I want to cut the material with very high accuracy so with complicated parts, I can't really build them in Corel. Sqaures and things like that aren't a problem. I just draw them in Corel, but the snowflakes my students make are not reproducible with Corel's tools.

I tried changing the line type on the drawing to hairline with red 255, 255, 0, but then it didn't really do anything at all. I've also created a .jpg of the file, brought that into Corel, changed it over using outline trace and cutting off the excess with trim, but again, it's not very accurate since I have to "guess" where the border of the page was and Corel tends to interpret each line as two lines. I also tried importing .dwgs file and .dxf files, but Corel won't read those either even though they are listed as file import types.

So, does anyone know of a way to print directly from Inventor with cutting or a way to save the file so that Corel can read it with all of the dimension information remaining intact?
Thanks,
Jennie

[Denford Admin]

As you know, the key is to get true 0.0 line thickness and 'pure' red before printing to the Laser driver.
I don't know about Inventor but can't see why it shouldn't allow full control over sketch lines for printing - is there some kind of printing template which defines lines thicknesses, font type etc ?
Alternatively, I'd be aiming to export as postscript (.ps or .eps) and try that in Coreldraw (as we know that can print raster and vector cuts)

If you can maybe try exporting the 2D sketch as an older .dxf version or exploding the shapes into simple lines/arc/polylines and then trying to export-import a .dxf into Corel.