Flexisign Pro Sign Programmers
You always receives for your money! It is true that some plotter company deliver free plug-ins at purchase of a new device. It's your responsability to make or not confidence for your business into this kind of 'free' software. Probably it appears as a good solution to start, but is not just a 'marketing' argument from the plotter company sellers? Will it be updated at time for your next evolution?
Support is a key when you are in production world with so expensive media than vinyle. Support has a cost and I can't believe a 'free' product can compete seriously in this world when you have to keep in touch with the pressure of customer delays. We, at NCS, develop our solution from more than 10 years now and believe that a good product must insure support, at short as at long term. A good software is a software that you forget you are using.
Years after years. It is mostly the case of many of our customers. Free VS $$$$$$$$ Well he did say the plotter was connected to a PC, MagiSign doesnt work on a PC? My plotter came with CASmate. Ive been using that software for years to drive my plotter. I just hate designing on that old macintosh and everything on it is slowly going out, I use to burn a CD and just pop it in and plot from CD, now the SCSI cdrom doesnt work, I dont own any floppy drives on my new systems and the files wouldnt fit anyways but I do have Zip disk and drives.
So then the scsi port on the back of the macintosh has gone out, one of the serial ports no longer works, and the keyboards ADP you have to wiggle to get the keyboard to work and you have to punch the keys a few times then try to delete if you typed Logoo so it may take hitting the key 5 times and the 4th time deleted the o and the 5th time the other o so now your trying to type o slowly so only one pops up. And the mouse is crap, Ive torn it completly apart and have cleaned it, sometimes the mouse doesnt want to click. Not to easy to find ADP mice anymore. I really dont want to invest anymore money into a ten year old computer. Id rather just try to save and get the plotter working on a newer system which means replacing the software and buying a hub so I have more USB ports and then the keyspan usb to serial adapter. I emailed graphtec and they havent even bothered responding to me. Its been like what 3 weeks now?
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I'm half tempted to just buy a new plotter, I see they sell for $1250 and come with some free software, Sure Id be doubling my price but at the same time. Id have a plotter with newer interface and the software could drive both plotters once I buy the adapters. I could keep the big plotter here and put the small one into a bread/delivory van and have a mobile sign shop. Get a few extra batteries install an RV switch (it charges the extra batteries and keeps the main battery seperate that way you dont drain the batteries and cant start the RV) Install one of those, Put a big DC/AC adapter in and run a decent sized UPS, Make a USB to remote starter system so that when the UPS tells the computer the power goes out (batteries are dead so the power inverter isnt working) It kicks on the engine to recharge everything back up. Could even run a USB device that sensors the tempature of the van and when it gets to warm it starts the engine for the a/c unless I just put in a a/c thats 110 or a camper a/c on the roof I do own a cutting tourch and I know how to weld and soilder and wire things up. Install a CB and hit up race tracks on the weekends and truck stops and go to flea markets and swap meets and any other community event, use the outside large blank areas of the van as advertisement space for the business and put all sorts of samples. Its something Ive been thinking about doing for awhile, I know where I can get a van for $3500 thats like 30' long and 10' tall and has a decent white paint job.
Could always look into what fedex does with there old big vans, I heard UPS just drops a new drive train into them unless they are wreaked then they just scrap them out for parts to repair other vans. That kind of van would be good too because I can stand up and walk around (I'm 6'6') I can also keep paint (i hand paint signs too) MDF (wood for signs) and a few colors of cloraplast, I can also rig up the roof to carry ladders and be a platform for working on tall sigs if i can get the van near it (i like the vans like this that half the cab is missing because of the bucket and boom, trying to find one for sale isnt easy) and I can put a big rack to hold all the different colors of vinyl i have. The only thing I dont see room for is my 3D foam sign supplies. Guess I could always put a tow package later and add a trailer. With Graphtec I was just wanting to see if they have any upgrades for the plotter, the two ports seem to be like a PCI card, I was wanting to know if they had something that you could pop them out, place USB/FireWire interface card in and do a firmware upgrade. Id be willing to spend a lot more money on something like that vs buying a $69 keyspan adapter.
I mean what happens if my 10 year old cable brakes now i got everything going and no DIN8 to serial port on plotter cable if my USB cable brakes out on the road (i got dozens of them brand new, the type printers use) I can carry spairs or stop at almost any computer shop, bestbuy, frys, circuit city and pay $30 for a brand new one, Go onto ebay and I can buy more for $4 each shipped to my door, I have hundreds of these from when I was a Cable Internet Installer. Cable modem to usb. If they had ethernet (most did) I kept the USB cable in plans on ebaying them. Then I found out these cables sell for $30 at bestbuy and $0.01 on ebay with $3-6 shipping.
Not much money to be made and a lot of wasted time. I can even get (wireless internet so when I am anyware in town i have internet access) When Business is slow park that big van on a busy street so people see the signs and I can play online with my websites I own or post in forums while advertising my business to all the vechiles driving past me. Ive been working in the vehicle graphics industry for the last 5yrs for the UK's largest sign company. I work in the HQ on technical support, the software we use is one the most commonly used vinyl software's Its called Composer by Gerber, the software is typically 'PC' and i personally dont like it, simply because ive been using Illustrator for almost 15yrs BUT from a vinly cutting point of view there is little that will touch it. Not only can you cut vinly but also run an Edge printer. Aside form this there is another software called SignLab, again superb for cutting vinyl's and running the Edge (at least i think it will run one.never used it.although my boss had extensively). There are a number of companies around the UK and im sure across the wold that will also tell you that signlab can be used as a Software RIP for large format Printers, this is crap.its a vinyl cutting software and should be used as such Using Corel (ewww) and Illustrator is ok for cutting, but its better to create your artworks in these apps and then import the files into your cutting software.
Composer uses.plt (plot files.although eps', tif(f)s and jpgs can be imported and Signlab uses eps's and the like HughJ. About a cutter upgrade I was just wanting to see if they have any upgrades for the plotter, the two ports seem to be like a PCI card, I was wanting to know if they had something that you could pop them out, place USB/FireWire interface card in and do a firmware upgrade.
No, this product does not exist. It is absolutely not in the way to proceed of Graphtec to provide upgrades for an older model. Just consider the already 'low' rate of turnaround from old to newer models in the sign industry and the price decrease of new models during those 10 last years: there exist no reason for producers to introduce upgrades of older devices on the market and the market is clearly to low in terms of quantites for a third party companies to produce the kind of interfaces yo are draming about at the time you have universal and low cost 'USB-to-serial' adapters on the market. A technical reason explains it also: USB is faster than serial communications. Older plotters processors would have some difficulties to manage the flow of bits from a true USB - USB communication between the computer and the plotter.
Meaning the conceptor would have to decrease the flow speed on its card, and thus. Would have to produce something similar to the currently available 'USB-Serial adapters'! For best results hey guys, i am new to this post, but have been in the Sign game for ages. Recently i discovered AutoCAD Inventor and Solid Edge.
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When you have the time, check them out. With Inventor i can draw a fully 3d object and even send the profiles to our routers for mould cutting, so the time it takes to design the sign is all there is, no need to re-trace anything after the design, simply send it to the vinyl cutter and/or router and you're sorted. Inventor is not freeware though oh, and as for smoothing of lines and stuff, i find that corel is the easiest for Pc users, you can customize your shortcuts where most other programs don't allow you to. As for cutting straight from corel, try the demo version it works perfectly, have to buy a license to remove the irritating watermark though.
It runs off standard HPGL drivers and all you need to do after the design is complete is click print, wooooo! I used FlexiSign PRO on the mac for over 5 years. FlexiSign PRO 5.9v3 for mac was the absolute best version of Flexi (imo). Several years ago I ordered the upgrade for OS X functionality and ended up waiting over two years for the company to actually deliver it. Our department was stuck in OS 9 for two years waiting for them to play catch-up.
Excuses are just excuses. Nobody else was taking two years to upgrade to OS X. But it is upgraded and there is a Version 7 available for Mac OSX. Hands down, Flexi is the superior app in terms of user-friendliness and added features, (panelling, welding etc.) however, you can acheive the same results in AI with the plug-in at about half the cost.
The full version of Flexi will run you a couple thousand, but well worth it, if you have the budget for it. Click to expand.They are using a plotter designed to draw on paper with an ink pen. The pen is replaced with a small pointed knife.
The material is a thin vinyl sheet that is on a stiff waxed paper backing. To make a sign you cut out the letters on the plotter then stick them into the sign, or car or boat. The adhesive is very good. We've tested some of it by placing it on a coffee mug and then doing many cycles in a dishwasher. You can also use a kind of 'low tack' vinyl to make a stencil. You put the stencil on the sign and then paint the letters. You need special sign cutting software.
Becasue the plotter draws a line by simply moving a pen. But a cutter must makes two cuts, one on either side of the line. The plug in software does the conversion. Plotter software for the Mac? NOTICE: Anybody who is cutting vinyl from their Mac should check out signcutpro.com / The software is priced for a variety needs and depending on your plotters age they have adapted a wide variety to function with their 'plotting software'.
Other than Sign Cut Pro I have not found any other plotting software that will work on the newer, with USB connectivity, Macintosh's computers. You do have to have a design program like Illustrator CS or various other design programs. Go to their web site and look around or contact them directly with any questions you might have regarding setting up your plotter on the Mac and what it would take to get you up and running they are very helpful. As far as your plotter you have to check and see if your plotter has been adapted to work with their software other than that always check the plotter's manufacture to see if they have a driver available for the newer Mac OS. If I can help in any other way feel free to contact me. Nice to see there are some who still post on this, I came here a few times looking for answer and MagiSign isn't it because it's not updated to work with CS5 that I can find and we'll not purchase anything we can't try out first because the fact that a large amount of these software programs are way over-priced for what they are ( ie: FlexiSIGN ) and usually are buggy and crash a lot.
I'll check out SignCut Pro, tried it a while back on PC with Corel, but wasn't fond of how it worked. Lets see if it's better or changed lately. The only thing I like really about Flexi is their production manager, that's the only thing they've done right in my opinion. The design portion of this program on the mac never gets updated like it should, crashes when you close a file window and sometimes even when you open files.
That's one expensive program to be that buggy, to me if you're going to charge that much for a program it needs to be the best and not go out in such poor stability and lack of little support for the mac. So I advise to be very careful with Flexi. I wouldn't have even paid any attention to this thread, except years ago, I was doing some work for a guy who bought a vinyl sign cutter off eBay and planned on setting it up to cut his own vinyl signs for the side of his vans and so forth. (He not only had several rental properties he managed, but he also owned several daycare centers.) He was a Mac guy, but had kind of a mish-mash of older hardware in his office. Initially, we attached his sign cutter to a Windows PC running XP Pro, simply because the sign cutter appeared to work best via a parallel printer port and included a basic 'starter' type edition of FLEXISign software for Windows. I recall having a relatively easy time getting it to cut out text that I typed up in any of the Windows truetype fonts on the screen, but graphics seemed to be a real pain. (I don't think the software had any capability of taking a standard piece of 'clip art' like you'd find in a collection of GIF or JPG images and turning into a vector graphics type file like the software required to cut with.) At some point, I threw out the idea of loading Corel on one of his Macs and getting the plotter connected with a Keyspan adapter and its serial port - but I found another job by then and didn't really do anything further with it.
As inexpensive as some of the vinyl sign cutting machines seem to go for in online auctions though? The idea of getting my own occasionally comes to mind, but I'm far from a 'graphic artist'.
I'd be interested mainly in software that lets me lay out what I want, with both graphics and text, without needing special vector graphic art files first. Is there anything that sophisticated on the market, for Windows OR Mac, at this point in time? (Essentially, I guess I want something that feels like a desktop publishing or word processing package, except with ability to cut to the sign cutter just like you'd print the document otherwise?). Nice to see there are some who still post on this, I came here a few times looking for answer and MagiSign isn't it because it's not updated to work with CS5 that I can find and we'll not purchase anything we can't try out first because the fact that a large amount of these software programs are way over-priced for what they are ( ie: FlexiSIGN ) and usually are buggy and crash a lot. I'll check out SignCut Pro, tried it a while back on PC with Corel, but wasn't fond of how it worked.
Lets see if it's better or changed lately. The only thing I like really about Flexi is their production manager, that's the only thing they've done right in my opinion.
The design portion of this program on the mac never gets updated like it should, crashes when you close a file window and sometimes even when you open files. That's one expensive program to be that buggy, to me if you're going to charge that much for a program it needs to be the best and not go out in such poor stability and lack of little support for the mac.
So I advise to be very careful with Flexi. Ok, yeah SignCut Pro is not going to work out, it's below basic and or average in it's use. It's limited by not having enough of the older plotters ( As companies rarely want to spend another 3 or 5k on one ) and I can't get it to import in any of CS5 AI files ( Which I kind of expected ). I tried a while back to work with them at my previous employer to get them to come closer to what SAi's production manager does. If they'd only look at what that one does and model a lot of their functionality after it, they'd have a pretty strong cutting software. The problem you face in this business is Adobe does not remove the Art Board limitation from Illustrator.
You can only go so big and it stops. In the Sign business ( Or my case Sports Mat business ) you're dealing with Logos, Letters, Substrates and a good portion of them are far better than what Illustrator can handle. Where I work at we have text that has letters at the height of 3 to 5 feet.
Text strings that go anywhere from 4 to 20 foot. Logos that are 11 foot wide and 8 foot tall. This is where Flexi has a us because it does not have a limit on the size of the Art Board. For that matter, neither does CorelDRAW and never has. It's a shame they stopped making that for the Mac, because that would be a sign makers dream to have it and the one program that turns DRAW into a full blown Plotter controller for Plotting, Cutting and Printing. Since we're on a Mac, it'd not be cost worthy to change over after spending so much on the computer and Flexi.
Problem with Flexi is that it's way too buggy on the Mac side, because SAi only focuses on the PC ( Which is why the PC version is on 10 now and Mac is still on 8.5v2. It crashes for so many different reasons on the iMac I use it's not funny. Usually just from me closing a file.
After all of this, I'm back to trying to find an alternate software that is on the Mac and can be used to run a GS132S Vinyl Express plotter ( Yeah I know, it's 10 years old ) and can read Illustrator CS files ( I can always save down a version or two ). But this on going battle with Flexi and the lack of any other options is driving me crazy. If you have any suggestions, I'm more than willing to read them and take them into consideration. Yeah that will be a little tough since Plotters don't look at images, they look at lines. So Vector is the only way to go, even EPS files are Vector in how they are read by the plotter. That's one thing I had to educate a few here where I started working now is that as far as what we need ours to do, no form of bitmap images can be used except to load them into Illustrator, outline them or trace them, then send them to Flexi to be resized to fit what we need them to fit and plot it out. There are smaller programs though that are not Flexi, that can offer you a low budget end on the PC, but I'm not finding much on the Mac side.
Right now I'd give anything to have Windows installed on this iMac and run Corel X5 and buy the sign plugin software that turns that one into a sign making monster. Far cheaper than buying Flexi, that's for dang sure. I wouldn't have even paid any attention to this thread, except years ago, I was doing some work for a guy who bought a vinyl sign cutter off eBay and planned on setting it up to cut his own vinyl signs for the side of his vans and so forth.
(He not only had several rental properties he managed, but he also owned several daycare centers.) He was a Mac guy, but had kind of a mish-mash of older hardware in his office. Initially, we attached his sign cutter to a Windows PC running XP Pro, simply because the sign cutter appeared to work best via a parallel printer port and included a basic 'starter' type edition of FLEXISign software for Windows. I recall having a relatively easy time getting it to cut out text that I typed up in any of the Windows truetype fonts on the screen, but graphics seemed to be a real pain. (I don't think the software had any capability of taking a standard piece of 'clip art' like you'd find in a collection of GIF or JPG images and turning into a vector graphics type file like the software required to cut with.) At some point, I threw out the idea of loading Corel on one of his Macs and getting the plotter connected with a Keyspan adapter and its serial port - but I found another job by then and didn't really do anything further with it.
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As inexpensive as some of the vinyl sign cutting machines seem to go for in online auctions though? The idea of getting my own occasionally comes to mind, but I'm far from a 'graphic artist'. I'd be interested mainly in software that lets me lay out what I want, with both graphics and text, without needing special vector graphic art files first. Is there anything that sophisticated on the market, for Windows OR Mac, at this point in time?
(Essentially, I guess I want something that feels like a desktop publishing or word processing package, except with ability to cut to the sign cutter just like you'd print the document otherwise?). Click to expand.Digital van? What do you mean by this signguy? I am interested, do you mean you fabricated a plasma to your van? Please tell me I'm on the right path as I'm thinking of doing this for my business. That link is not currently working, would be nice to see some of your work.
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I bought a Roland GX 24, which is very cool. I am only using Illustrator with a plug-inm but I am only a doodler for fun.
I have seen tutorials on youtube with graphtec machines that create cutting leaving small dashes in the cut to nearly cleanly cut the whole vinyl as a seperate motion, if anyone can understand what I'm ambiguously trying to explain. Click to expand.You're right, the Gerber software is Windows only. One of my clients switched from Composer to Flexisign a few years ago. So far, it's been pretty good.
It even has a 'UI emulation mode' where it shows the Gerber tools grouped similarly. Not so great that I'd run it that way, but it's good for transitioning staff. Flexi's US Support can be pretty hit or miss (more often miss, even with a support contract) - so make sure that you have solid support from your UK reseller should you go this way. Again, I'm not connected with Flexi in any other manner than as a customer - their website is. I'll try to wake up this old thread again I've been looking for some cut cutter software for mac for a while now, without luck.
I previously used Signcut X2 with VMWare, which worked ok, but I didn't really like having to use VMWare to use my cutter. Then Signcut released their Signcut Pro, which also had a Mac version, so I upgraded.
The Mac version was just horrible. Hardly worked at all, cut wrong, crashed and such. I moved back to using the new Pro version on VMWare, but even that one works far worse than the old Signcut X2 and often cuts stuff multiple times, misses the last lines in a cut, locks up and such. Also it turns out that after upgrading to the Pro version, there is no way to downgrade again.
In conclusion - I need something better! I would like some cutting software for Mac that works. I usually design in Adobe Illustrator, so any plugin or similar for that would be nice. Is there anyone that know of any decent software that works well on Mac, preferably for a decent price?