Was struggling to find the right program for converting my Illustrator SVGs all the way across the spectrum to working GCODE. Specifically, Makercam was incorrectly scaling the designs during import and I couldn’t nail down what was wrong in regards to Illustrator settings (as if scaling in Makercam is correct, research showed to check your Illustrator settings).
After days of trying every program recommended, I finally came upon Method Draw. As I had seen in a previous Bar comment, he used a program exclusively just to open and then immediately save a file, and this is what I did with my Illustrator SVGs in Method Draw - open SVG - save SVG.
I then (fingers crossed) uploaded the SVG in Makercam and wouldn’t you know, a properly scaled drawing. So, for those out there who prefer (or like me, can’t handle / don’t need more dense drafting software), a bulleted process looks like this.
Export SVG from Illustrator
Upload SVG in Method Draw and save in Method Draw as SVG (File: save image / not “export”)
Upload Method Draw SVG file in Makercam
Apply your preferred cutting procedures in Makercam - export GCODE
Enjoy the sweet rewards as that sucker works in Ground Control (hopefully)
Thanks to everyone who had mentioned differing programs that had worked for them. The article that eventually got me to Method Draw was here. They list 15 so if one doesn’t work, maybe another will…
We are using Illustrator, too … export DXF to re-open in ESTLECAM (http://www.estlcam.de: It’s a German programm, but with English language option) to generate gcode …
We’ve had no problems to date and can only recommend it!
Adobe basically forced my hand to stop using them, after being loyal for 25+ years. Anyway, I always struggled with getting real world working files fit for CNC consumption from Illustrator. There’s a problem in the code as a hold over from when it was Macromedia owned.
Anyway, I’ve successfully transitioned over to Serif Lab’s Affinity Designer program. And it outputs SVGs properly, once you figure out if your system is output scaled to 96 dpi or 72 dpi. Once, you set that in the export function tab, it’s perfect for hobbyist CNC output.
Illustrator was never owned by Macromedia and predates Macromedia by several years. Freehand (a sort of illustrator clone) was owned by MacroMind which later became Macromedia which later was bought by Adobe who developed Illustrator.
Affinity Designer is awesome though.
Right… now I remember. But there’s something in the way they handle bezier curves, points, nodes and lines that’s not quite industry standard CAD. Which is evident when you export as a .dxf or .dwg, you get hundreds of polysplines instead of closed arc segments. They’ve never bothered to fix it or acknowledge it. But there have been many third party plug-ins over the years that have addressed their real world output issues with those file types. It was explained to me years ago, and it never made sense to me until I got into CNC work and dealing with companies that had industry standard CAD and CAM software. And my inability to adapt and learn something new, or even GASP on a windows machine had hampered my ability to get the most out of CNC made parts and production.