getting frustrated

[susibi]

Hi again from (snowy and cold) Italy.
Well - the little miracle arrived and I started to play: I cut out flurries of snowflakes, Christmas trees galore, stars and stripes, wrestled finely cut intricate lettering off my carrier sheet ( yes at the beginning it is extremely
sticky!) but .... as I design printables I wanted it to be able to cut out my little creations while I was doing something else and .... it doesn't!
I can't get it to accept a graphic with a design in it unless I patiently trace it by hand- which almost sent the machine into tilt because it cut along every teeny jagged line I made!!! At that point it became little more than an expensive pair of scissors. Something I did do was to get it to accept some of my vectors from Paint Shop Pro by saving the drawings as a photoshop(psd) format, then placing in Illustrator, autotracing, exporting as dxf then loading into CR. Very longwinded indeed.
I have understood one thing though - you have to use coloured paper if you want a coloured object as CR only gives you gradient or solid colour fills. Anyone found a way of importing patterns into the CR software?
So - I'm a little upset that I still can't get it to do what I want. I do love the many templates that are out there but would dearly love to be able to use my own with my graphics in them yet it won't accept png format so all the graphics have a nice white area...grrrr
Any hints anyone- I'm not giving up yet though!!
Oh yes .. and I have found out how to make a border, cut out the window from a card and make an A4 scrapbooking template- a positive thought: anyone tried making stencils out of acetate yet??
Susi

[BevS97]

as far as I can tell there is no way to import a graphic and have it automatically trace it to cut it out. Depending on the shape of the graphic, it is *supposed* to be quite easy to trace once you get the hang of it, but I haven't got the hang yet.

You may have more succcess playing with Illustrator, and cutting directly from Illustrator using the new plugin - I haven't done that yet, so can't really advise more that that, but I know it's a possibility.
Also, have a good play with the Open Officesoftware, it seems to be very powerful as well, but I can't find a TRACE function in there, which would be extremely useful.