Illustrator for laser cutting and engraving

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Software description

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor. It's part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, and it's sold in a subscription-based model. Illustrator is compatible (although not completely) with InkScape. Both software allow exporting in .svg, PDF, .eps, and .ps formats.

Main Tools

Illustrator has a variety of tools for selecting, drawing, typing, painting, rotating, reshaping, creating graphs, zooming and moving objects (to cite a few). One of the most important tool is the pen tool, which allows to create straight and curve lines, create (and delete) anchor points on paths.

How to create a 8 cm diameter badge

Create the project

Start with opening a new project and set its size to be 802 mm (800 mm for the circle and 2 mm to work as a margin). It is possible to change the units (if not already in millimiters) by selecting the right unit from the drop-down menu, as shown in the picture below.

How to change the units in Illustrator

Sources

• Abobe Illustrator page on Wikipedia
• Illustrator pour la découpe et la gravure laser on EduTechWiki