It's shareware, so it's free, but that also means that it's not as easy to use as the other two.Īfter downloading and installing, use File -> Open to open the relevant image (in my case, a jpg file). This is a vector-drawing program, analagous to Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. Fortunately, there is free software that will do it for us. This is complicated by the need to distinguish between the colors of the pixels. How can we do this? It actually requires some pretty sophisticated computing to analyze a bitmap and realize that the pixels are arranged in a curve or a line or whatever. Suppose we have a bitmap and we want to convert it to a vector. Okay, enough background, now let's solve your problem. The laser turns on, follows the path, then turns off. Common computer file formats for vectors are DXF, SVG, AI, CDR, PPT, and PPTX (yes, PowerPoint).įrom a laser perspective, because the computer controlling the laser understands each element (line, curve, etc), it can direct the laser to follow that "path", which is how we cut things out. Because the computer understands that each element is a line or a circle, or whatever, the computer can also understand how to manipulate or modify those lines, circles, and curves. Circles are denoted by the X,Y coordinate of the center, the radius, and the ends of the arc. There's a bit more to the equation to describe where the ends of the line are located. Remember your high-school geometry class? We know an infinite line can be represented by y=mx+b. With a vector image, the computer stores mathematical equations for the lines and curves. The second type of image the computer can understand is a "vector". That's why we see our lasers going back and forth, row by row to mark our image onto wood, glass, or whatever. Common computer file formats for bitmaps are jpg, JPG, BMP, TIF, TIFF, GIF, PNG.įrom a laser perspective, because the laser is controlled by a computer, all it can do is "scan" or "raster" this image - it goes along the row and fires the laser according to the color of the dot. The computer has no idea what all those dots represent - it doesn't know that they're arranged to form a straight line, or a curve, or a letter, or a dog. The computer knows the first pixel (dot) is black, and the next one is red, and the next three are blue, and so on, dot-by-dot and row-by-row. To the computer, a bitmap is an array (map) of dots (bits). When we take a picture using our phones (or digital camera), or when we draw something in Photoshop, we are creating a bitmap. The most common images we see on our computers are "bitmaps". Let me start by describing the two relevant types of images (which you may already know about). EDITED FROM AN ANSWER TO A QUESTION- ANY CONFUSION IN THE TEXT IS MY DOING- GDU
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