Simple artwork like text is the easiest artwork to cut with a vinyl cutter. All keyboard fonts are considered vinyl cutter ready vector art (VCRVA or VCVA). All text on all the Windows or Mac included fonts can be typed directly into a vinyl cutting program. This includes fonts like Symbol. Alternatively, you can draw shapes and prepare vector art specifically for vinyl cutting with a graphics program like InkScape, Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. Usually, when people want to vinyl cut an image, creating clean vector art is the most time consuming process but yet it is the most important. Creating clean VCRVA is even more time consuming because adequate thought has to go into figuring out what portions of your design you are going to keep and what portions you are going to remove or ‘weed’ away. If you take a photograph and bring it into a cutting program like Flexi Starter 10 and automatically convert it into vector art you will likely have a mess to clean up. Vector art format differs from bitmap or JPEG art format in that vector art contains lines and arcs to define the picture whereas bitmaps and their equivalents are just a pattern of pixels without any edge definition. Your vinyl cutter can cut lines, arcs and circles but cannot cut a pixel so all artwork must be converted to vector art so your vinyl cutter can cut it properly. It turns out that Flexi interpreted the yellow as 8 shades of yellow and created edges between the different shades of yellow and separated these edges onto different layers. In the end, a simple black, yellow and blue image ended up being 25 different colors and had edges on 25 different layers. Most of the issues associated with vinyl cutting are related to vector art quality.
The vinyl cutting industry is more geared to PC’s and not Macs. There are systems that are Mac compatible like SignCut but Flexi is not very Mac compatible in its current version. Make sure that your cutter is in the online mode and that the cutter and correct port are selected in the cutting software. This is very important to establish proper communication.
Setting up blade depth and pressure or force is critical to getting good cuts. There are basically two parameters that need to be set to achieve good cutting. One is blade depth relative to the carriage and the other is pressure set by the cutter. These parameters vary in importance between machine manufacturers. A good way to set blade tip height is to peel off the vinyl and expose the vinyl backing. Place the blade holder in the down position. Some machines have a button control that will allow you to automatically push the carriage to the blade down position while for other carriages you will need to push down on the blade holder manually. Fasten the blade position so that the tip of the blade is slightly penetrating the top surface of the vinyl backing. From here, you will need to set the pressure.
