I have a small shop where we do some custom laser etching/engraving. A customer recently brought a job needing several thousand Acrylic panels of various sizes cut and etched. I can do these manually but was told that LightBurn is amazing for this task.
I am open to any help anyone is willing to provide or if there are project consultants that can help to build out a solution I am open as well.
I have a PC running Adobe Illustrator (have InDesign as well) and I use an Epilog CO2 Laser
The customer provided an excel file with about 6 tabs, each containing different subsets of labels. The labels vary in size from 1"x3" to 5"x7", and various colors of 2 tone acrylic (Blue with White Base, Yellow with Black Base, etc), and 1-3 lines of text with text height
The excel file is broken down well with Width, Height, Color, Font 1, font 1 size, font 2, font 2 size, etc)
I am trying to figure out how to lay out all of the labels to create the panels in Illustrator so my tech can just run the jobs at the laser. I need it to create the label sizes, lay them out efficiently on the bed with the Font centered horizontally/vertically and with the right size of each line.
Its a fairly simple process to do manually just horribly tedious, and I would greatly appreciate any help or insight.
LightBurn includes the ability to import data from spreadsheet and text files, but it is content import, not parameter import. You might be able to extract into a secondary support sheet the information regarding settings and have that import into a tool layer, to be displayed to the operator, while the text portion would become the burn information. I suppose it is possible that it would not be necessary to extract and create a second spreadsheet for each job, but I’m not as capable in the feature that allows import, although I have used it in simple form.
I am not sure why you would want to interject Adobe Illustrator into the mix, as LightBurn is certainly capable of creating the jobs as you require.
I would bet that people look twice at using AI in place of Adobe Illustrator. I did and immediately corrected my entry!
Because LightBurn cannot set those parameters from the imported CSV file, you must do it manually.
Basically:
Sort / select the data to get groups of common parameters
Create separate layouts with labels having identical size / shape / font / size / whatever parameters
For each of those layouts, import the corresponding CSV file
Profit!
A recent discussion went over some of the choices:
You may need some customer negotiation to reduce the infinite number of combinations to something manageable. After that it’s a matter of making layouts to match the specs, then feeding the corresponding text into the layouts.
