Since our weekend article on engraving/routing software, we’ve learned of a company called Softeam, that does both engraving and routing/cutting products for the Mac.
MacSign 5 is designed to facilitate the design and production of vinyl signs, rubylith stencils and other related products. Its target audience includes sign shops, quick printers, retail storefronts, fleet management, facilities management, silk-screen printers, graphics art houses, advertising agencies, and tradeshow exhibit companies.
MacSign Lite is a “bridge” application that imports artworks saved by desktop publishing applications (Illustrator, FreeHand, Canvas, Corel DRAW! Etc.) and sends them to vinyl cutters. Imported artworks are displayed on the worksheet before processing and can be resized, positioned, mirrored, turned, distorted, duplicated and more.
The tiling feature panels the design, with user-specified overlaps, and allows the user to cut large designs one panel at the time or all at once for complete job output. MacSign Lite also supports background spooling (which frees the computer for other tasks while the cutter is working) and automatic color separation, so that multicolored artworks can be cut one color at the time or all at once.
MacEngrave is designed to simplify the creation of nameplates, trophy plates, plaque plates, badges, jewelry and gift items (door knockers, pens, money clips, etc.) directly on your Mac and send them to an engraving machine. Targeted to engravers, engraving shops, and personalized items companies, it lets users create engraving jobs from scratch or trace over scanned images with drawing tools.
MacEngrave lets you define the characteristics of the cutting tools you’ll be using. It shows you an on-screen simulation of the cutter as it would engrave the job, and it offers other engraving features. MacEngrave works in conjunction with a variety of engraving machines, including Roland DG CAMM-2 series.
For more info go to the Softeam Web site. Thanks to MacCentral reader Mel Patrick for alerting us to this company.