Corel Draw to LightBurn Macro Issue: Project Not Found (LBExport.ai)

LightBurn Software Questions
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Hello! I work in IT for a school district and our Tech. Education instructor uses CorelDraw to allow his students to import images, layer them, and eventually send them over to his laser cutter. I’m trying to get him set up so that the students can create their projects in CorelDraw, then hit a button to run a macro that brings their projects from CorelDraw to LightBurn. I followed instructions about getting the macro set up in CorelDraw and it worked almost flawlessly. You click the button, it launches LightBurn, and it attempts to import the project file from CorelDraw into LightBurn. However, it’s running into a problem in that final step. Whenever it launches LightBurn it gives an error saying “Project not found - LightBurn 0.9.09. The file ‘C:\LBExport.ai’ could not be found”.

I’m not super familiar with any laser cutting software or how this macro works but I think I can see where this error is coming up. My theory is that when making the transition between CD and LB it tries to make a temporary export file called LBExport.ai that LB can pull from when it opens. Maybe due to a permission or pathing error it can’t write or read the Export file? Is that something that would make sense for this software? Am I understanding how it works properly?

I believe it could also be occurring because of how our file systems are set up in the school. I’ve seen other users on here with a similar issue saying that the path it was looking for was C:\Users\TheirName.… which isn’t the same error we’re getting here. This would be strange because the users here still get a User folder created for them so it would seem like nothing should be different.

If either of these are the case what could be done about editing the macro to point it in the right direction? I’ve tried editing it from my administrative account but just ended up breaking the macro and having to start from square one again. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
EM

(As an aside, and this may be a dumb question, does the Tech. Ed. teacher even need CorelDraw or could he accomplish everything he needs to do right from LightBurn. I’m not super familiar with this software and I’m wondering what the purpose of using both would be for him and his classes. They import images from the internet, layer them, and cut them. Any education for me would be appreciated)

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It’s been a very long time since I was in IT but it might be something to do with how Active Directory is configured. It’s possible that roaming profiles have been disabled and also writing to the root folder on the local machine is disabled. It’s just a guess really but it might be something to look into with your IT dep’t.

In the meantime I’ll do a bit of investigating to see if I can come up with a better answer for you.

Hope this helps.

Edit:
Ok, I’ve found this page which might help. It lists all the various special folders that can be returned by the Environ() function. It might just be a case of going through the list substituting “HOMEPATH” with one of the other folders (such as “TEMP”) listed on the page.

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Thanks for the response. I’ll give this a try. When I was messing around with it earlier I tried to change HOMEPATH to a folder name that I placed on the root drive but I’ll try changing it to USERPROFILE. That looks like it might do the trick. I’ll let you know if it works!

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I’m happy to report the macro is up and running! I was trying a bunch of different options to path the file to the right place and nothing was working. Then I happen to notice in the debug tool that it was attempting to save the LBExport.ai file to C:C:\Users.… I knew we didn’t have a C drive within the C drive so I removed the phrase at the beginning of the output line that said “c: &”. Then I changed HOMEPATH to USERPROFILE. This did the trick! It now saves the file to a real destination and can be read again by LightBurn when it opens. Thanks for the help pointing me in the right direction!

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That’s great, glad you got it working. Actually I did question prepending of the path with “C:” very briefly but I forgot to mention it in my reply.

Well done!!

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