It's not rocket science. There's just always been a disproportionate level of confusion because vinyl cutting started as a vertical market solution for the sign trade, sold and supported through resellers. Documentation has historically been overly technical and sparse; not really targeted toward hobbyists. That's changed slowly but significantly in recent decades, but there's still way too much confusion.
Here's the gist of it:
Cutters are basically just glorified pen plotters that push a knife instead of a pen. That means they want to work with plotter-language files (HPGL).
Paths in general purpose drawing software like Illustrator are Bezier curves, not the HPGL-friendly "polylines" typically exported from CAD systems.
The basic pieces of the puzzle are:
The cutter. For your stated intention, you'll probably want a combination printer-cutter, not just a cutter.
A system-level driver. Just as with any other output device, a vinyl cutter requires an OS-level software driver to interpret between the computer and the cutter across whatever data bus the cutter connects to.
What I call the "middleware" software. This is a program which provides a reasonably intuitive graphical user interface for you to set options for the file being sent, previews the result, and translates the artwork format to the HPGL instructions needed for the cutter. This is the area from which most of the confusion stems, because the middleware applications come in a wide range of functionality and are delivered in several forms.
- Some cutting software just provides the barest set of options; similar to the print dialogs you use when printing.
- At the other end of the spectrum are vertical-market (i.e., quite expensive) third-party cutting softwares which are practically full-blown illustration programs (at least in the context of the sign trade) in which the whole design can be created and assembled in a production environment without even mucking around with a general-purpose drawing program.
- Between these two extremes are more reasonably affordable middleware programs which don't try to be complete drawing programs, but still provide convenience and efficiency in prepping artwork for cutting (scaling, rotating, stepping and repeating, assigning colors for separate vinyl load operations, minimizing material waste, etc.). This is the kind of middleware software I usually recommend. Most are in the form of a standalone application (which I recommend). Some are in the form of program-specific plug-ins (which I do not).
A plug in will usually have less functionality and moreover increases your dependency upon one particular drawing program. Plug-in updates also often lag behind changes to the host drawing program which can break compatibility. I avoid mission-critical dependency upon third-party plug-ins like the plague.
You do the design in your preferred drawing program and export it to one of several common vector exchange formats (.ai, .cvs, .eps, .svg, etc.) which the middleware program can import. You do a few cutting-specific manipulations you need to make the process less tedious and wasteful, make the appropriate job-specific settings and click a Cut button. Then you can save the file with all of its setups in the middleware program's format and keep it handy for later repeats.
Once you get accustomed to your particular machine and the general process, you'll find that you can do much of the file optimization in your drawing software. For example, in drawing programs which provide for different-size pages (FreeHand, Corel Draw, always late-to-the game Illustrator, and others) you can do your original design on one page, then move its various pieces to vinyl-specific pages set to the width of your vinyl. On those pages you slice and arrange all of the pieces of a particular color to minimize waste while still making application practical.
With a standalone "mid-level" middleware, I can do my designs in any drawing program I want, and use the same interface to do final prep, send it to the cutter, and save it as a ready-to-cut archive file.
Understand, the above is about cutting, because that's the portion of the work which most differentiates the technicalities from printing. Your stated use suggests that you may need a combination printer-cutter. Functionally, a printer-cutter is just what it sounds like: a printer built into a cutting plotter. Decent size printer-cutters (~24" wide or more) cost a lot more than just cutters, still hovering around the $10,000 range. There are a few small desktop models, but they limit your size dramatically. So you need to have a serious-enough business case to justify the expenditure, and bear in mind that although the "prosumer" market has matured somewhat, devices do become obsolete as ink technologies change. You want profitable payback in a reasonable timeframe.
Regarding your question about a "contour cut" specification in your artwork file, that is just a workflow convention used by some middleware programs to distinguish the paths you intend to cut from those you merely intend to print as part of the artwork. Common practice is to create a spot color swatch with a particular name ("ContourCut" or some such) and apply that swatch to the stroke of paths you intend to be used for cutting. The middleware looks for paths "colored" by that name and assumes they are meant for cutting. It's a minor detail, and is not drawing software-specific (unless, of course, you go the software-specific plug-in route).
JET
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