Cut/Contour Lines Issues

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 9, 2021
3 replies
6915 views

Bought a Roland BN-20. Using Illustrator for my graphics. I have downloaded and installed the Roland VersaWorks Swatch from their website. When I save as either a PDF OR EPS, the file will not load into the queue and says the file is corrupt. When I load a JPEG file that has ZERO cut/contour lines, the image loads perfectly fine and will print. This tells me there is an illustrator issue, NOT a printer cutter issue. Seems like this is the spot to ask for help. I've had a number of "experts" help with this and nobody seems to have a solution. All help is welcomed. I am using Illustrator 2021 from our Creative Cloud Desktop.

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Gleeful_Charm9459

Participant

Try saving as PDF 1.4 Versaworks is really picky. It used to, still may, refuse to cut files with a transparency. PDF 1.4 always works. You can also try using cutcontour. com to generate these.

Met1

Legend

Run a very simple test - blue square with ContourCut spot as stroke - save as pdf with Acrobat 4 (pdf 1.3) option.

M

Matthew221719005loqAuthor

Participating Frequently

Got the same results

Luke Jennings3

Community Expert

This is just a guess, but make a new layer in Illustrator named CutContour and move the cut lines to the new layer, save as a PDF.

B

Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

First of all JPEG images will not hold vector-based graphics. A cut contour line is a vector-based object.

Next issue is the CutContour swatch itself. It's not something that actually has to be downloaded. Just open the Swatches palette, click the drop-down menu and select "New Swatch". In the "Swatch Name" field type "CutContour" (with no space between the words). Under "Color Type" choose "Spot Color." You can leave the color mode as CMYK, it doesn't matter, but make the color a loud one that will stand out. Most people use a 100% Magenta default. Once created the spot color will be availabe in your Swatches palette. Apply that CutContour spot color to the line stroke of the path you want to use as a cutting path.

This procedure works for several other RIP applications and plotters, not just the ones from Roland.

Next trouble shooting step: make sure the PDF or EPS files your sending to Roland VersaWorks are compatible with it. Is this a current version of VersaWorks or an older copy? You might have to save an EPS file down a few versions older to get it to work with VersaWorks. It has been a long time since our shop used VersaWorks. I remember some issues with PDF files where CutContour lines wouldn't show up if there were things like transparency effects in the artwork.

M

Matthew221719005loqAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you for responding.

I tried doing jpegs just to see if the printer would at least print...not cut...which it does.

I aleady had a cutcontour swatch in place, it was magenta, it was cmyk, and spot color. The stroke is also 1 pt.

As for the versaworks, its versaworks6. I use illustrator 21 on CC Desktop.

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

VersaWorks should be seeing the cutting path if it was set up as I described. I'm pretty sure the latest version of VersaWorks can handle more complicated PDF artwork and still allow print and cut operations from it. It wasn't like that back when we were using it; I'd be forced to make flattened high res TIFF images of certain kinds of artwork I wanted contour cut. We retired our old VersaCamm VP540 several years ago and got a pair of HP Latex printers (controlled by Onyx Thrive).

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