Thanks for your response - You are correct that I know nothing about the t-shirt industry (although you never can tell what people know on these forums). My only point is that dxf is far from obsolete. In the aerospace industry we don't use autocad most of us use CATIA a subsidiary of the French company Dassault. Since you mentioned Solidworks I may add that Solidworks was purchased by Dassault to fufill low end manufacturing needs such as small parts from small shops. Last I heard, Solidworks sold for about $5K while CATIA is about 20K - from what I know autocad is used primarily in the architecture industry. I am very familiar with all of the formats you listed and they all work cross platform except sldprts which only work in solidworks. If I could convert a PSD to any of the formats you listed (other than PDF and EPS) I would be happy.
Cheers,
Kaz
In a message dated 08/08/11 22:18:59 Pacific Daylight Time, forums@adobe.com writes:
Photoshop not only produces raster images - you also have the ability
to produce paths, which are vector based. So it is not impossible to
make a conversion from PSD to 2D dxf. I saw a thread in another forum
where someone was trying to do the job with PS scripts. hopefully he can
come up with it - or I may just have to bit the bullet and buy
illustrator.
Yes you are right photoshop can produce paths. But there is no stroke or fill, to my knowledge the only export format is illustrator(I have not tried the pdf format). Currently I do not know of any drivers specifically for photoshop, but I have heard they are available for illustrator.
As far as dxf being obsolete - The dxf file
is the standard procedure in the aerospace industry for moving data from
3D CAD to a projected 2D format for cutting flat parts in aerospace
tooling shops. I have 26 years experience at 16 different companies
including companies in England and Canada. Now it is always possible
that new things arise that I am not aware of however, they are not the
industry standard in aerospace tooling ... yet. So while we are at it
what are these new formats you speak of, that replace dxf files for
manufacturing?
I don't know if I would say obsolete, but it is getting quite old. And frankly assuming your using autocad, I don't know how limited you are with formats, they may still prefer dxf since it is there own format.
As for other formats, there are:
solidworks (sldprt)
STL
IGES
Step
DWG
DXF
PDF
EPS
Plus way more than I can list.
The thing is each industry is different, in what they consider to be the standard. So rightfully so, I can not say what is the standard for the Aero Space industry. No more than you can for the teeshirt industry for example.
That being said, there are a lot of file converters on the market, but I assume (have not tested them) that they prefer vector to vector translations. Though some could have an autotrace feature, which would be required for a raster image.
So to get a file from photoshop to your device, it looks like it will require purchasing another app to get there.(This is an assumption as I do not know about all the plugins for photoshop on the market)
Illustrator can import the ai file from photoshop and save it to dxf, though you may want to add a stroke to the paths, just to see it.
Illustrator or corel trace can trace an image and export to dxf
and finally a translator program to convert to the dxf format.
Or bypass photoshop all together and purchase illustrator, or any one of the cad/camm apps on the market.
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