I remember no hard drives, and just floppy disks, when you used pc-dos, cobol, fortran, and cards to load into reader to load the program,.. LOL
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Been playing with the camera calibration and workspace alignment. I have found the easiest for alignment to work perfectly, is to ensure you do not have a lot of light going into your laser cabinet (I have Xtool S1). I actually shutoff my shop above lights and have a little light on next to my work desk, then turndown the lights in the Xtool S1 to about 15-20%, and the calibrations come out almost perfect. More testing, but this is how I have found to get increased success, at least with my setup. I hope this may help others. I also cover my bed with a piece of white poster board to eliminate the bed confusing the software during calibrations. Brian - RlDesign Innovations
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The first computer I placed my fingers on was TRS80 that belonged to a friend. All data was saved on a regular cassette tape.
A small file, maybe 5k-10k would take 30 minutes to load… if you where lucky. Sometimes you had to do it more than once while hopping on your left foot, right hand on your head and doing the hokey-pokey before it loaded correctly.
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seriously? they made all those updates? iI am still trying to learn the basics after the last update.
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They aren’t. Modern AI files are just renamed PDF files, that part is true - it’s called PDF Preview Content, and it’s on by default but can be turned off. The actual AI file is embedded in named chunks within the PDF.
LightBurn supports both, but the AI chunks have more detail, and it’s less complicated than the PDF data. I know because I wrote it from scratch. It’s worse, actually - it’s 3 levels deep to get at the real content, like a weird Russian nesting doll of a format.
The “normal” way to support PDF, for anyone in the print world, is to use someone else’s library to load them and rasterize them into an image for printing or viewing on screen.
If you didn’t want to be able to use the vector data in the PDF, or change the text, I could write that in a couple days.
If you want to be able to modify the text or the vectors, now you need them in their native form, and you need to support the entirety of the format, including composition painting. That isn’t simple.
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In my conversations with Adobe in the past, there are those that will agree and disagree with me. This said, in the 10 years since I retired things may have changed. I do know it’s the opinion of many print professionals that PDFs are more versatile and easier to deal with.
In most cases, but not all, the font is embedded into the PDF file. If it isn’t than yes, the font must be available on the user’s computer. This happens when the font is only licensed to the original creator and not allowed for distribution .
In the commercial print world, digital printers have a RIP (raster image processor) built into it’s controller (computer). This RIP would take vector images and fonts and rasterize them. It would also take any RBG image or PMS Spot color (Pantone Matching System) and convert it to CMYK. Since all this information is built into a PDF this is completely hands-off. Once the PDF is loaded into the controller the operator only had to assure the parameters are set for the job (Qty, size, fold, staple, trim, etc.), run a proof copy, then just load the paper, press start, and box the order. I could train an average person with no printing experience to run a digital printer within a week.
That would be nice and yes I would prefer this as would many others as well.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve read on your forum and on FB the amount of people that are confused as to why the text doesn’t appear in LB when importing a PDF.
For now how about just having the text show up outlined instead of being editable with vectors remaining vectors. This would solve many problems for many users of your software.
While you are at it, how about adding a thumbnail to the exported .ai file.
There’s a chasm of difference between a print professional looking to send a document to a printer, and a developer looking to extract usable information from a file in order to reconstruct a document. PDFs are great for printing.
Illustrator itself loads the Illustrator content embedded in the PDF, like we do, and on save, just regenerates the PDF preview content. You can verify this easily - the PDF will generally clip anything that’s outside the visible page, while the native Illustrator content embedded in the PDF does not.
PDF is a print format, but not really an editing format. If you wanted to load a PDF and simply emit it to the laser as a rasterized image, that’s quite doable. If you want to edit the content before sending, that’s much harder, because we’d need to make LightBurn “understand” the PDF content and be able to manipulate it, not just rasterize it using a 3rd party library.
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Sorry, I disagree.
PDF = Portable Document Format.
Now if you’re using Acrobat Reader then yes you can’t edit.
If you are using Acrobat Pro, then yes it is quite editable. Everything from changing text and fonts to editing, resizing and changing graphics.
So we agree that it can be done
If you have the source code for this software, then you can confirm how it works internally. PDF is not a format, it is a wrapper application. I do think there is a raw PDF format, but none of that applies here.
I don’t think Adobe gives out their source code.
Of course not!
Yes PDF is a file format.
Illustrator, InDesign, MS Word and WordPerfect (and others) are all wrapper applications, each with their own file format.
The problem is LB can import .ai and .pdf files with vector graphics along with the ability to edit them. What it can’t do is parse fonts correctly.
You added ”file”, which changes the meaning of what I said.
What you say then doesn’t make much sense
Sorry, I do not know how to explain it better without going into my programmer and applications mode.