New Product Review

Xenetech Graphic Workstation 6.47 Ready for General Availability As A Free Update

We are pleased to tell you that XGW 6.47 is now available FREE for licensees of XGW 6.x software. While this version does fall under the current 6 series codebase, there have been some significant changes that should make you consider installing this update.

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Engrave-By-Color

The Color/Layer engines have been improved to include full support for all laser functionality when using engrave-by-color. Aside from the ability to fully process speed and power attributes by color assignment, support has been added to allow usage of "Raster Lines Individually" within the sequencing process of EBC.

This means that instead of all lines of text of a certain color engraving at the same time while the lens moves across the entire table area, you can elect for the software to still respect the sequencing of colors but command the laser to actually engrave the text in individual chunks within the smaller regions of the master material.

Imagine your laser engraving table is broken down into three virtual columns, each comprised of 1/3 of the entire table area. Within the operation of Engrave-By-Color, you can have the optic carriage travel across all three columnar regions as the bridge moves down the table area or set the system to engrave the output within each column individually as the bridge moves down the motion system.

Output Engines Rewritten

We have re-engineered our laser and rotary output engines to offer you more accurate positioning of plate and layout objects for all plate orientations including normal, reverse, mirror, sideways left, sideways right, and upside-down.

This also yields marked improvement for handling bitmaps and photographs by including them in the output optimization processes, so instead of all logo and text items engraving as a function of optimized paths, and then bitmaps being processed in an additional path, all layout objects are processed and engraved at the same time, or according to the settings in Engrave-by-Color.

In conjunction with these improvements is additional functionality allowing for the virtually unrestricted use of bitmaps and photographs in any rotation for their use with cylindrical attachments.

Other Things You Don't Need to Know, But Should Listen To

We'll skip some of the technical detail here, but some of the internal processing for the machine engraving files has been changed.

The immediate benefits include better alignment between raster and vector data in a laser job, including the alignment of outlines with wireframed text. This also resolves some obscure "cumulative" positioning errors that may occur as a job reached the far ends of the table extents.

X Center / Y Center

Engravers can now choose X Center / Y Center instead of X Left / Y Top when doing multiple plate jobs. This is because X Center / Y Center is now applied to each master sheet in a multiple plate job, just as it is for each single plate in a batch job.

Menus & Buttons

Cary Johnston, Software Development Manager "This release offers a big improvement to customers and is a necessary evolution to continue us on the path to the next level of product development. Exciting things are coming down the pipe, so watch for future messages from us about available software updates!