[Mike RZMachine]

Can anyone clear up as to how to use the bitmap import on Dcam? i tried it, and it recognizes bitmaps, let me select one, and seems to have imported it, prompts for a starting point for the bmp, but it doesn't show up in the drawing. if i try to import again, it gives an error message stating that it has already been imported.

alternately, has anyone found a good freeware program which translates line drawn picture files into .dxf?

thanks,
Mike

[John S.]

Can't help with the bitmap thing in Dolphin as I have never used it but Inkscape is a good free convertor.

John S.

[sqatch]

File: Import Bitmap: Pick the bmp. you want then click the cactus icon in the tool bar and your picture should appear. Then you can postion it with the mouse. Scale by zooming in or out before placement, this is a wierd feature I just discovered while writing this post.

[harley4ever]

Sqatch I have done that and it seems pretty cool. How do I get it to the cam now?

[sqatch]

What I do is trace the lines I want with the regular drawing tools keeping in mind how you want it cut.Then create contours from those lines. The bmp. can now be deleted.Open machine modual and create tool paths.

[Mike RZMachine]

thanks for the tip. i guess that only solves half of my problem though. i need to get up to speed with the Dcad sketcher to become efficient at tracing.

for JohnS using inkscape, i installed it, and figured out how to trace bmp's but the .dxf export function doesn't export usable dxf's. i installed pstoEdit, as the help file for inkscape says. it got rid of the errors that popped up in inkscape when saving to dxf, but the dxf still isn't usable.

i guess the bigger task i'm trying to accomplish is to translate a line drawing to a tool path for engraving. how have other users accomplished this?

thanks,
Mike

[sqatch]

I used to use a program that had a trace command but it gave me such a mess of lines that had to be edited I found it faster to just draw them manually. You can use layers on complicated drawings to avoid confusion. After a while you get pretty good.