Chris Collins

Tools · fabrication

Vinyl cutter helper

Text in a Google Font or an SVG, ready for a vinyl cutter — weeding box and weeding lines, a contour outline for stickers, mirroring for HTV, a layer per colour with registration marks, drag-knife blade offset with corner swivels and overcut, tiling across the roll — exported as SVG or HPGL, or sent straight to a USB-serial cutter.

Added

How to use it

Type some text or open an SVG, and the tool prepares it for a drag-knife vinyl cutter: the cut paths, a box and lines that make weeding easy, mirrored for heat-transfer vinyl, split into colours, and compensated for the blade’s offset. Then download the HPGL or send it straight to the cutter.

How to use it

  1. Design:

    • Text: type it (several lines are fine) and pick a font — a dozen Google Fonts (Roboto, Bebas Neue, Lobster, Pacifico, Great Vibes…) or your own TTF, OTF or WOFF file. Letter and line spacing and alignment are yours to set; kerning comes from the font.

    • SVG file: open or drop one. Shapes are cut along their outlines, in millimetres from the file’s width, height and viewBox. Each fill colour (or stroke colour, for unfilled lines) is its own layer. Convert text to paths first.

    • Test cut: a 25 mm square with a triangle inside, for setting blade depth and force.

    • Set the width or height in mm (leave the other 0 to keep the proportions).

  2. Material: a preset fills in the blade offset, overcut, speed, force and passes, and HTV presets turn mirroring on — heat-transfer vinyl is cut from the back. The figures are starting points: always do a test cut. Turn 90° runs a long design along the roll.

  3. Weeding: the weeding box is a rectangle round the design (with a margin), and weeding lines cut the waste into strips: across the box between rows of text, and between letters within each row. They never cross the design. Smallest gap stops lines being squeezed into tight gaps.

  4. Contour cut: an outline round the whole design, grown by the offset with round corners — a sticker’s edge, or the cut line for print-and-cut (print the design, then cut the outline). Contour only cuts just that.

  5. Layers: with two or more colours, every layer gets the same three registration marks (small squares at three corners, so a layer can’t be put on turned round) and the same weeding box, so the layers line up when you apply them. Click a layer to preview it; download each one as SVG or HPGL.

  6. Cutter:

    • Blade offset is how far the blade’s tip trails the holder’s axis (about 0.25 mm for a 45° blade, 0.5 mm for 60°). The paths are moved ahead by the offset, and at every corner sharper than corner swivel above the holder sweeps round the corner on a small arc so the tip pivots on the corner and stays sharp — a corner loop. Closed shapes start mid-way along their longest edge, and overcut carries on past the start so the shape is cut free. Show blade path draws the compensated path.

    • Passes repeat the design (not the weeding lines) — useful for cardstock.

    • Roll width and side margin: a design taller than the usable width is tiled into strips across the roll, overlapping by tile overlap so the pieces can be joined. Each tile is its own HPGL file.

    • VS (speed) and FS (force) are sent only when ticked: on many cutters VS is cm/s and FS grams, but not all agree — Graphtec sets force on the machine — so leave them off when unsure.

  7. HPGL is IN; PA; SP1;, optional VS and FS, then PU / PD moves at 40 units per mm, ending pen-up at the origin. That is what most cutters that "take HPGL" accept: USCutter, LaserPoint, Redsail, Vinyl Express and many unbranded ones, and Graphtec in HP-GL mode.

Sending to the cutter

Connect cutter… opens a USB-serial port (Web Serial) at the baud rate you choose — 9600 baud with no flow control suits most cheap cutters; use hardware flow control if your cutter’s manual says RTS/CTS. Send to cutter sends the selected layer (and tile) in small chunks, paced to the line speed so a small buffer keeps up, with a progress bar and a cancel. Load the vinyl and set the origin on the cutter first.

Web Serial works in Chrome and Edge on a computer (Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS). Firefox, Safari and phones can’t reach the cutter, but everything else works: download the HPGL and send it with the cutter’s own software. Cutters that only speak their own protocol (Cricut, Silhouette, Brother ScanNCut) can’t be driven from here — import the SVG into their software.

Privacy

Your text and files stay in this page. Picking a Google Font downloads it (and opentype.js, which reads it) from the jsDelivr CDN, and a contour outline loads the Clipper library from there too. Sending to a cutter talks to the USB port directly. Settings and your last SVG are kept in this browser’s local storage.

Runs entirely in your browser — network requests go only to the services named on this page.