LaserUser.com Forum (formerly RDWorksLab)

Hello everyone. I've been laser cutting models of all sorts, but mostly for HO model railways for about four years. That was on a laser cutter owned by the Cairns Men's Shed and most of the models were for the Shed's model railway. I was using CorelLaser which came with the machine.

A friend and I recently purchased a Chinese Red and Black machine which contained RDWorks. Initially I started using Lightburm which I'd been experimenting with before, but it doesn't have a CorelDraw conversion module built-in. There are other things about the program I don't like and that's why I'm here. I plan to use CorelDraw as my main design suite and RDWorks to control the laser cutter.

My work is generally close tolerance stuff and the Men's Shed machine never let me down. I am experiencing tolerance issues with the new machine but I think it's due to saving CorelDraw to Adobe Illustrator, then to Lightburn. Because a lot more people seem to use the CorelDraw / RDWorks configuration, I'm hoping this forum will prove to be invaluable.

I design most of my stuff, but I also modify plans I purchase from the Internet. Everything I do ends up as a 3D model.

Welcome John- If you are comfortable with RDwork and use Corel, that may be the best avenue for you. LightBurn is a superior program in my opinion but perhaps they should consider a Corel input. What that would entail I have no idea but it is a common complaint. I have never used Corel myself so I can't help on that front. I will forward this to the Mighty Oz at LB, perhaps he has a better answer. I have used RDw heavily for 4+ years and have never noticed an import problem with .ai files but I use a different 2D program and I suspect that is the problem. Hopefully one of our members who use Corel can help you. Good luck, Gene

LightBurn has a CorelDraw macro / plugin that will export directly into LightBurn with a button press.
We can import AI, SVG, PSF, and DXF, all of which can be exported from Corel or Illustrator, so direct support of CDR format is a goal, but not high priority as there are several easy alternatives.

Hi, following up with this as I had a similar concern.

I'm new to the program but I had some trouble importing files correctly into LightBurn. I have a CorelDraw image with lots of shaded areas that I would like to raster. Imagine a map file where the water is dark and the islands are light. I chose several different file formats and the shaded areas and islands would just import as lines. I couldn't get the interior dark areas to come in as solid dark areas to be rastered.

Also the CorelDraw printer driver (for another machine) would allow me to select specific colors in the drawing and set the power / speed. With LightBurn it seems everything imports onto "layers" for which you establish the settings, but you have no control over how they get imported or what goes on which layer.

Any advice? Thanks