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Contour Around Text

by Louie Alvarez

Calling Corel Gurus a posting on SawMill Creek caught my attention. When reading the responses I was not at all impressed or satisfied with the suggested solutions, hence I took it upon myself to create the file and explain how I did it. Since I explained and wrote a solution along with providing the final file for the inquirer to use, it’s appropriate to post it in my own blog:

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Q: Calling Corel gurus
I’m trying to work out how to do a few things in Corel. I’m trying to make a name plate necklace like the “Helen” picture I’ve attached. I’ve been asked to use a specific font which isn’t a solid type, it’s very ornate. The problem I’m having is when when I try to group the letters and create a boundary around word it’s won’t just do the boundary it also goes inside the font. I hope this make sense. Any ideas?

I was thinking I could make each letter a silhouette (solid black) and make it slightly larger then the font I want and outline it for vector cutting… but I have no idea how to do that?!

PS I’m looking to engrave the name onto acrylic, then vector cut the acrylic around the type (the word itself)

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A: Great question Gabe,

Although I’ve been in the industry about 18+ years I never was interested in joining forums, just don’t have time. Well I’m glad I decided to join this forum, seems to be one of the larger lasering ones available.

I have a 9 year old daughter so this caught my attention, of course I’ve also been using CorelDRAW since version 2.01, now on X4 so I like a challenge or something I’ve not done in years.

Anyway this is a great question so I took it upon myself to determine how I would approach this project if I was doing it for my daughter and decided to go ahead and just create the layout/design myself. I’ve attached the final file in CDR v12 for you and anyone else interested in viewing it.

The black is set for your engraving, the red outline is set for vector cutting. Since I don’t know what laser system you have hopefully your able to assign raster engraving to black and vector cutting to red, all the better lasers on the market are capable of this, such as, GCC LaserPro, Epilog, Universal…

Moving right along, I recalled an article I wrote for a customer years ago on how to vector cut a photograph outline (a silhouette), using those steps I accomplished the project in this manner.

1. First export the text into a bitmap file to allow opening in an image manipulation program
2. Next using the “magic wand” select the outline of the image
3. While the image/text is selected fill the new image SOLID black. This text required me to zoom in and close the open areas on the outline to properly select the text completely.
4. The text should be solid black now, so resave the bitmap
5. Import this new SOLID black silhouette image back into Corel
6. Using Corel’s rather decent outline decent tracing feature, I would say since about v12. I use vX4, so in Bitmap menu select Quick Trace.
7. Some of the letters I had to zoom in to nudge over the letter so I could weld them together, i.e., Gla, mGi, rlz
8. Using the Shape tool I also had to break apart some nodes, extend them and connect them, i.e., am, & ir
9. You’ll have to add the two rings on the end to attach the chain, easy to do just create a circle inside of another, combine them, weld this to the sides of the words.
10. You may also want to use the Shape tool to clean up the outline further if you like. Figure I would leave some work for you

I could go into further detail of what I did but this overview should be sufficient. Any questions I would be happy to elaborate.

GlamorGirlz CDR file download

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