Contour Cutting (Print And Cut With Reg Marks) - PrismCut P20 User Manual

3.5 Contour Cutting (Print & Cut) with registration marks
Contour Cutting (also known as Print & Cut) involves printing a design that has
special registration marks in the outside corners. The registration marks are read
by the cutter to allow precise cutting around the outside contours of the design.
Common uses for contour cutting are to create peelable stickers or cutting out
printed designs from printable heat transfer vinyl.
You may see the term ARMS (Automatic Registration Mark Sensor) being used
to refer to Contour Cutting. This is just a more technical term for achieving the
same type of results as Contour Cutting, also known as Print & Cut.
In order for the software to be able to find the outside edges of your artwork
and draw a contour, ideally you want to use vectorized files with no background
such as SVG/AI/EPS vector files.
If working with pixel based images such as photos, JPEG files with a background
or images with a solid white background, you should remove the background
and save as a PNG whenever possible. In general, images with a complex back-
ground are likely to need modification to remove the background prior to proper
vectorization and contour cut use.
PDF files can contain both vector and raster images, but usually these are on
separate pages within a PDF document. Zoom in on the image to see if it starts
to pixelate when magnified (raster) or keeps lines smooth (vector).
Refer to section 1.3 on page 6 of this manual to learn more about pixel based and
vector based images.
Before creating your first contour cut, you may have to calibrate the camera, but
this only needs to be done once. Refer to the Calibration instructions in Section
4.2 of this manual if your camera has never been calibrated.
Another advanced contour cutting feature is RegMarkTracking which means
adding additional registration marks in addition to the 4 corners to help keep
alignment straight over a very long job run length. It is even possible to use the
RegMarkTracking in conjunction with Udisk so you can run repeat jobs without a
PC being attached.
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