Cropping in Inkscape??

[bingaling]

I own a Cricut Expression and cannot afford to purchase a Silhouette too. I do have SCAL2 though. I know there is way to purchase shapes from the Silhouette Store, hit print screen and put them in Inkscape, crop them, save them as an .svg file and then use your SCAL2 and Cricut to cut these files. Only I have no clue what I am doing! I downloaded Inkscape and the Silhouette Store, purchased one file that I would like to convert and use, and have googled and youtubed my hiney off and can't figure out what I am doing. Can anyone please help walk me through this process so I can make notes and teach myself how to do this?? I'm going to try and post a picture of the file I want to cut. Thanks in advance!

...okay I couldn't figure out how to attach a print screen in here...sorry.

[gj1]

http://www.craftedge.com/tutorials/tutorials.php

You can do all of this right in SCAL2...see Creating #6 in the tutorials above.

[bingaling]

SCAL2 won't let me paste a print screen. I also tried to right click the image in the Silhouette Software and copy, then tried to paste into SCAL2 and it is just copying the last SCAL2 shape I used from another project.

[bingaling]

I figured out how to crop what I need in paint, import it into Inkscape but now I need to convert it to .SVG - when I do a file/save as and select .SVG and save, then go to SCAL2 and import the file, it says "failed to load svg file". Am I converting it wrong??

[Sweetness4713]

You have to do a trace image first.. you can save a regular photo or painting as an svg..

[papasue]

See the FAQ's for how to add a file attachement to your post. There are some other information here that will be helpful too. Below is a screen capture of the area below where you post that allows to you add attachments to your post. Hope this helps so we can see your pics.

faq.php

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[bingaling]

Hopefully the picture attached correctly.

[papasue]

Hi, yes you attached it correctly and I have opened it in Inkscape.

However, although you saved it as an .svg file you did not convert the "image" to a "bitmap" by using Path/TRACE BITMAP. You can find lots of tutorials for trace bitmap in Inkscape but on your file there are some special things you need to do.

When you do the trace bitmap you will need to select "color quantification" to do the trace. See pic below. This is because the image is YELLOW. Now you have a "path" that SCAL can recognize. Delete the original image (yellow) and save as .svg.

You might still need to break apart and re combine to keep the centers of the letters.

I know this is not a complete answer but it should get you started

Screen shot 2011-12-08 at 9.27.06 AM.png (58.44 KiB) Viewed 6664 times

Screen shot 2011-12-08 at 9.27.42 AM.png (61.13 KiB) Viewed 6664 times

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[bingaling]

Uh I feel like such an idiot...I followed your directions and when I checked the "color quantization" box my image turned black with a few white lines. I tried it several times and got the same result. I feel like I'm missing something.

[bingaling]

Okay I went back to paint, saved it as a bitmat, imported it into Inkscape and followed your directions and it sort of worked, only after I moved the colored image to the side, the black image I was left with does not look like your example. Mine is a mess. See attached.