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Help With Engraving Signatures


YARGNAIRB
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I've been tasked with making a special Plaque containing 30+ signatures engraved into it. Can anyone recommend a way for me to scan the signatures from a piece of paper and import them into MasterCAM? I've already scanned them all and have them in PDF format, but I can't figure out a way to import a PDF into MasterCAM??? I've attached the PDF files, if it helps.

I need to keep all of the fine detail in the signatures as much as possible.

Any help is always greatly appreciated!

Brian

Joel 2.pdf

Joel 3.pdf

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Hi Brian,

 

The way that I would try to import the signatures into mastercam would be to save them as an image file (could even just do a screen cap of the pdf?) and then use the rast2vect chook to import the images. I have had very limited exposure to this chook so I don't know the ins and outs of it, but it'll definitely be able to get the image into mastercam for you. I am not sure that you will get great quality lines from it though. Have a play and let me know how you go.

 

Brendan

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Brian,

 

A scanned image is a raster graphic, think of a black and white newspaper photo. It’s just a bunch of dots. MasterCam needs vectors, lines, arcs, splines.

 

Newer versions of MasterCam come with a raster to vector chook, older versions it was an add on. It works, but it’s not perfect and often needs extra work to make it look decent. Hold ALT and press C to bring up the chooks and look for rast2vec.

 

To get a nice looking raster to vector conversion is often difficult and you may want to job that part out, but here are some tips if you want to try it.

 

Do one name at a time.

Scan at a high resolution, start with 600 DPI.

The signatures should be ink, the cleaner and bigger the better.

Save the scan as a graphic file, bmp, gif, jpg, jpeg, pcd, pcx, tif, tiff

Use a graphics editing program to clean up and fix any bad areas before converting to vector.

 

Sometimes it helps to scale up the raster file, convert to vector, scale down the vector file to hide imperfections.

 

Sometimes you have to redraw some or all of the vector file to get the results you are looking for.

 

You can get good results, but it take some care.

 

Do a google search for raster to vector and you will find a ton of information.

 

Best of luck

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I've been tasked with making a special Plaque containing 30+ signatures engraved into it. Can anyone recommend a way for me to scan the signatures from a piece of paper and import them into MasterCAM? I've already scanned them all and have them in PDF format, but I can't figure out a way to import a PDF into MasterCAM??? I've attached the PDF files, if it helps.

I need to keep all of the fine detail in the signatures as much as possible.

Any help is always greatly appreciated!

Brian

 

Try these. You can draw a manual spline over them in another level.

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Try these. You can draw a manual spline over them in another level.

 

I have the pdf files saved as .tiff files as well if you want to bring them into art and manually trace them. Looks about the same as the other files.

 

Send me an email if you wan the .tiff files.

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