Professional Engraving Systems

How to Control the Order of Engraving in CorelDraw - by Ben Rosenstein

One of the more frustrating aspects of engraving logos is to have your engraver jump all over the engraving bed while it is engraving the logo. Your engraver may jump down to the bottom left of the logo and then up to the top right of the logo and then back down. This can start to cause your engraving time to become longer and longer. This tends to be very inefficient.

I, like most, want to optimize my engraving time as much as I can and time is money. Also if you are running your engraver out of CorelDraw it is important to know the engraving order of your drawing so that your engraving is optimized. Also you may want certain items to engrave first and others to engraver later.So let’s look at how we accomplish this technique.

1. Open up CorelDraw. Navigate to the tools menu, See Figure 1, and select “Object Manager”. Your object manger will “Dock” at the right side of the CorelDraw screen.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Now create 4 images on the screen. These images could be anything you want but make them different so that it is easy to distinguish them later on. If you use my drawing draw them in order as per my diagram with the square first, than circle, spiral and pentagon.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Once you have drawn the images you will notice in the object manager that there are 4 items listed. Each one of these listings corresponds to the 4 images that you have drawn on the screen.
   
   
   
   
   
4. Now without anything selected press the tab key once. An item is selected. This is the first item of the four objects drawn. It is also the last item that you drew. If you look in the object manager on the right you will notice that it is the top item in Layer 1. Note: if you cannot see the images in layer 1 click on the “+” sign that is to the left of the “layer 1” text. This will expand the layer to show you the objects.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Now press the tab key again noting the object that is selected as it pertains to the object on the screen in your drawing. See Figure 6. If we press the tab key again and again you will see that each item is selected in a specific order. The order moves down from the top. Thus is we were to take this image into Xenetech the image needs to engrave in this same order.
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. We can get these images into Xenetech in either of two ways. First of all we can use the copy and paste method. This method is fine however when we bring the image into Xenetech this way we may loose our method of ordering. To test this, import the image into Xenetech by “copying” the image from Corel and then “pasting” it into Xenetech. Select the image. Next go to the Color menu and select “disassemble the polygroup”. Deselect everything. Then press the “+” key on the num pad to cycle through the objects. Remember to have nothing selected. The first image to engrave is the one that is selected first with the “+” key. We can see that the selection process does not follow our order as it was in Corel.
   
   
7. So if copy – paste does not work what does? We would use the .plt (HPGL Plotter) export filter. To accomplish this we need to go to File => Export in CorelDraw. Select the .plt filter from “Files of Type” and export the file to a directory, preferably xfiles\plt.
   
   
   
   
8. Now switch to the Xenetech program and import the 4_images.plt file into Xenetech using the .plt extension.
   
   
   
   
9. Now go the Color menu and disassemble the polygroup. Deselect. Now with nothing selected press the “+” key on your number pad and the selection process will follow the way you created the image in Corel.
   
   NOTE: If you do not have the drawing tools just engrave the image after you import it into Xenetech.