Few days ago I installed LightBurn and I must say that it is far more superior than RDworks. I have chinese laser cutter with RUIDA controller and I think that preview with all optimization possibilities put LightBurn as first choise as software for sending jobs to machine.
However, drawing possibilities are good but when I need to do some complex projects I like to do it in Corel Draw or Illustrator. That means that I need to save project in .ai or .dxf format because LightBurn has no native .cdr file support.
My question to developer is: Did you plan to add support for corel draw files?
Also, it would be great to have plugins for most popular vector drawing applications, for easy importing to LightBurn without unnecessarily saving file locally and opening manually in LightBurn. I don’t know is it possible to make VBA plugin for LightBurn if LightBurn is not “prepared” for importing from third party applications?
I will continue to use LightBurn until trial period expires, and if I find some interesting proposals for new features, I will share my opinions here. With importing from corel option, I will buy licence for sure. For now, RDworks plugin do the job, because I’m able to instantly send everything from corel to RDworks in single click.
I use Corle home/student x8, I save as pdf and then import to LB, not everything converts in the import due to LB not having that feature, like curved text.
Sometime I have to recreate parts to work better within LB. I seen somewhere that there’s an import macro which can be used in Corel however my version of Corel doesn’t have macro’s.
I’m sure someone will add the link to the macro.
I use Corle home/student x8…I seen somewhere that there’s an import macro which can be used in Corel however my version of Corel doesn’t have macro’s…I’m sure someone will add the link to the macro.<<
Even if Lightburn had the macro capability, if I remember right, you still would not be able to use it because the student version of CorelDraw has blocked the ability to work with macros. You have to get a full version of CorelDraw.
Ok, native support for. cdr is not so important if there is some other method for exporting drawing in format which lightburn can open. Maybe we (community) together are able to make macro for corel which converts whole drawing to curves and export it in ai/dxf format, and then somehow programatically force lightburn to import that file with correct layer colors and dimensions. Of course, all process is done in background, so user dont see that conversion…etc. Rdworks plugin works like I described.
There has been some unofficial headway made by others toward reverse engineering the CDR format, so it’s something I plan to look into in time. Meanwhile, LightBurn supports AI, PDF, SVG, and DXF, all of which are well supported by Corel. If you export text, just convert it to curves first and LightBurn will happily import it.
CorelDraw format is based on winzip format… if you rename the file to *.zip you can open the internal file structure to see how it goes together including the bmp preview used for file explorer
