I have a HUGE .docx file I want to burn into a durable media. Pages and pages of text, hand entering text is out of the question! I can break the job down to one page at a time, but need high resolution for the text. Saving it as a .pdf in Word is too low a resolution for crisp characters, and my version of Word won’t convert text to paths.
There simply must be a graceful way to do this!
Thanks in advance,
nully
I assume you are trying to preserve font and formatting?
You can copy/paste the text into LightBurn but, I admit that will lose the font and the formatting may not be identical. If you want it to be of identical formatting and font to what you see in Word, your only option really is PDF. But I’m a bit confused by you saying the PDF resolution is too low - PDF is generally saved in a vector format making resolution a moot point.
Basically my point is that you need to get it out of Word in some vector format and PDF is likely your only option (a limitation of Word). How are you saving as PDF? Directly from an option in Word? With a PDF print driver?
Could you provide an example PDF here?
Yes. No apparent way to save as paths or vectors. Word 2011 for Mac.
That’s a screen cap of what LightBurn displays.
How big a PC monitor do you have?
Do a screen capture and save as image of some kind.
Does mac have anything like the Windows " snipping " tool…
Here is a snipped snippet from Word…
What size characters are you looking for in your laser output? I’ve never actually imported a PDF before but if it is imported as an image and if you scale it up in LightBurn I’d expect to get exactly the result you show. So my questions would be what’s the DPI resolution of the PDF, what point size is the text in the document and what point size are you looking for in the laser output? If those things don’t match between source and laser I would expect scaling to be taking place. I’ll reiterate that I don’t know how LightBurn actually handles PDFs, so I’m just guessing.
If no simple solution can be offered by those in the know, it could be done programmatically - as a method of last resort.
Worth a try, need to run some errands right now, will report back in a couple hours.
8 pt font.
Maybe you can convert to SVG and get better results. If you search Google for docx to SVG you’ll find several online tools. Hopefully one of them will work with the docx version you have. LightBurn can import SVG files, but again I have no experience of actually doing this.
27" monitor, screen cap at 300%, then shrunk down to final size in LightBurn, still a bit jaggy, but probably good enough at final size. Thanks!
Still hoping for an elegant solution…
Ty capturing close to final size. Should reduce some of the jaggies.
Sorry I’m not that elegant… 
Much worse, looks like the the bigger the original captured image, the smaller the jaggies. Worth a try, though.
Just curious; what is the final size of the burn?
For the proof of concept demo, one page, 85x185 mm, about 250 words, 1500 characters and spaces.
Then production is hundreds of unique pages, same size and density.
Sorry for all the questions, but what is the media?
Just wondering what kind of results I could get on a similar project…
That’s getting into need an NDA territory. Perhaps we could work together?
Not what I had in mind…
Just curious about your workflow…
Hope it works out for you…
Thank you. As soon as the patent application is filed, I’ll be able to talk more freely. That’s probably early June.
Did you try converting to SVG? I tried one site and the resultant SVG couldn’t be loaded in LightBurn as LB doesn’t support SVG text. Another and the output was completely useless. There may be other sites out there that will save a suitable SVG path. Or other vector files. You might find one of the online convertors do a better job of PDF output. PDF can be vector based but what you show looks more like a bitmap. If you chose File → Import in LightBurn it shows what vector formats it will accept.
If that doesn’t work I have written a quick docx to lbrn2 converter in Java purely as an academic exercise and because I was bored! 
If you have hundreds of pages to do and feel it’s worth the effort let me know and I can get it to a usable state for you.
OMG YES!!! It’s well worth the effort.
