A few years back I got myself a nice little pre-loved Curio Silhouette flatbed plotting cutter, it runs its little heart out cutting anything I can throw at it, it uses Silhouette Studio to send files from the MAC, the software has limited graphic capabilities but all in all a good round package.
And I love it. It belonged to a woman who thought she could do all sorts of not near defined "things" with it, but soon found out that the learning curve is steep indeed, especially if you don ́t know the difference between a vector and a pixel, so I got it cheap.
Cheap is my thang and I amfar too miserly to purchase the full version of SS and use the „lite“ version that is supplied with the plotter, which is good enough as it does everything I need and it does it well-ish, I have to do an online conversion of Affinity ́s SGV to DFX, but hey. If it works, it ́s not stupid. But the Curio has it ́s drawbacks, for one the machine is plasticy, and, two, it is only A5 and if you want a short run of, say, 50 cards or cuts, then it will...take...time. In short it is limited for the projects that I would like to do in the future.
So about a month ago, the printshop I like to go to for printing my stuff announced that they are chucking in the towel and that their Graphtec CE6000 Plus plotter with Autofeed would be available for a very, very reasonable price. And although I whined at the thought of parting with my money, I got the plotter and I have just spent the week setting it up.
And now comes the pain.
I have long gone over to Affinity for my photo and design requirements, because fornicate Adobe and their subscription based: „Rent-A-Software“ model.The problem I have is that Cutting Master 5, the software that imports outline files and sends the outline to the Graphtec plotter uses a plug-in for Illustrator or Coral and I can ́t find a way to import any format I can throw at it out of Affinity, so already I am one software packet down. Graphtec Studio however takes EPS, SVA, PNG. TIFF and JPEG and can send to the plotter.So I am running with that on the plotter side. However, the main part of the Plotter/robotic sheet feeder combo, The actual robotic sheet feeder uses I-Mark, a software that runs only on a PC and Slammer is a Mac man. That obstacle was soon overcome as I was going to get a PC anyway, I found a nice little HP business PC at a used PC shop nearby for 80 Euros and for the first time in my life I am owner of a DOS PC, (I think they call it "Windows" now a days though)
I set the thing up, only to find that I-Mark can only import Illustrator 88 files, whereby the „88“ is the vintage of the software format. It should however be able to take EPS as this option is available and shown in the glossy brochure. Now I have done the obvious and exported EPS via Affinity and was able to find and click on the file to import it into the I-Mark software where the whole bally thing crashes. My hopes and dreams were centered on I-Mark being able to import EPS from Affinity....
GRRR!
I had correspondence with Graphtec techsupport and they have made it very clear that the EPS import was never a high priority thing and that although I-Mark says it can import EPS... and it should be able to import EPS.... It can ́t !
BOOM!
I now have a workaround where I send my new friendly neighborhood printers an EPS file out of Affinity and they convert it to Illus8, that works but it is a pain in the rectum, if this is the way, then this is the way, at least until I find a CS version of Illustrator.SO my question, does anybody have a old CS version of Illustrator laying around gathering dust?
*sigh* *BIG SIGH*
Why is everything so damn complicated?