TUTORIAL NUMBER 1 – Create and Cut a Stencil

TUTORIAL NUMBER 1 – Create and Cut a Stencil
Open Stencil-Art. Your screen should look like this:
Note the alphabet keys on the right. You will notice only the [T] key is active. [T]ext initiates a
NEW sign. (All other icons in the side bar become available once text is entered.) You may click
on [T] or you can type “T” on your keyboard. It is your choice.
Now, Click on [T].
The text entry box is on the screen waiting for input:
Enter the word “TEST” and click OK. “TEST” will appear on your screen in the default [H] height
of 1” and at the default position of .5” for the (X) coordinate and .5” for the (Y) coordinate. Default
properties can be changed to better suit your individual needs.
Look at the side menu after entering your text. All of the icon buttons are available. Move your
mouse over each side menu button and you will see a pop-up label showing the full title of the line
parameter. The button letter and parameter are closely matched, i.e. [T] for text, [C] for color, [D]
for drawing size. Remember that the mouse and keyboard can both be used and one may be faster
or easier in some cases.
Let’s change the [H] height of TEST to be 4”. Again, either typing “H” on the keyboard or clicking
on the [H] icon in the sidebar allows you to input a new height increment. Type 4 (for 4 inches)
and Enter. You’ll notice the black “handles” surrounding this text line. Each of these handles
represents a parameter that can be changed by either dragging the individual handle with the mouse
or by clicking on the handle and typing in a new increment. If you double click the text line, the
handles change to blue. These handles represent a 2nd set of parameters that can be manipulated in
the same fashion. Change the [F] font to be “Stenoil.” (This font happens to be a very good all
purpose stencil font, FYI.)
We are now ready to send our stencil to the plotter for cutting. Before cutting ANY project, it is a
good idea to SAVE YOUR JOB. Go to File | Save As and save this file as “Job1.” Confirm that
this project is being saved in the “Letter” folder.
Stencil-Art requires File Names to be 8 characters or less. However, there is a “Description” field
in the Save Menu where you can put in a longer description of your job. This really helps when
looking for individual files.
MATERIAL SETUP
Thread the aluminum rod through your material roll and set on the cradle behind the plotter.
Loosen the pinch wheels and position them so that they are centered under the far left and far right
white arrows. Feed the material to the front of the machine under the pinch wheels and gently pull
until just taut. Set the pinch wheels down. If the green light is on (after pushing “Set Origin”),
cutting will start at this position. The tool blade should be at the outer edge of the material. If not,
press the green button to take the plotter off-line; reset the blade position using the arrow keys; and
press “Set Origin” again.
OUTPUT STENCIL TO PLOTTER
The Output menu comes up.
“Plotter-1” should be selected.
The “Panel Size” should represent your material
dimension…in our case the length of the material
[X] can be set as long as your material roll, however
the [Y] is limited to the width of the material, or 24
inches maximum.
Rotate Plot should be –90 degrees This rotates the
line of text –90 degrees, helping to conserve
material.
Weed Border should be set to “Line,” and for our
purposes, we will enter .25,” which will give us a ¼
“ weed line around our stencil.
Stay at Plot End should be checked. The plotter
head will remain at the end of the stencil after
cutting.
TUTORIAL NUMBER 2 – Creating Multiple Stencils
Creating multiple stencils is easy using the “Step and Repeat” function. Since we have already
designed a single stencil, we will use that example for our new project.
Go to File| Open and select “Job1.”
When you design a multiple stencil template, you may want to build the “weed border” into the job.
To do this, you will insert another line that will actually be a graphic.
To insert a new line in our file, either click on “Esc,” the “\” backlash key or go to “Edit” and
Insert Line. Using the “Esc” key is usually the easiest.
Click on “Esc” and choose the [F4] Function key for graphic. Go down the list and find, and
double click “Box.”
You will need to resize and re-position the graphic. To make this graphic larger, you could either
click and drag an outside corner handle to expand the box or you can type [H] for height, and type
in an exact height. The box in this example is 4.5” high by 10” in [E] for edit length. Re-size the
box and position the box over the lines of text to look like this:
TIP: When creating larger files, color code your lines. That way, if you decide to edit something,
you can easily select lines by color to change. For our example, if you change the box color to be
red, each line in the job can be group edited, by color, later as needed.
Now we will step and repeat our stencil.
Go to Edit | Group | Step and Repeat. When the pop-up menu appears, change the numbers to
reflect 1,2 for the 2 lines in our job. The Repeat Line Menu should appear.
The boxes at the top represent the
direction the original lines will be copied.
Click on the 1st box.
The W and H fields designate the area of
the largest line, i.e. the box. If you leave
these increments as is, copies will be
made butted together. If you wanted
space between copies, you would change
these increments to be larger (as needed).
For now, leave these as is.
For our example we are going to make 15
total stencils, so change the Column to be
3 and the Rows to be 5.
Click on OK.
TUTORIAL NUMBER 3 –
Creating a Multi-line Stencil Using Imported .TXT File
Various templates have been included in the Stencil-Art Program that may fulfill your
requirements. Feel free to use and modify these if needed. To view these templates, simply go to
File | Open, and arrow down to the desired template. You may preview these files if needed, by
checking the “Sign Preview” box.
In this tutorial, we will create a multi-line stencil and import data using the “Tag File” option.
This feature allows the user to import data from a spreadsheet or database to incorporate into the
stencil, and is especially valuable to sites requiring large numbers of stencils for multiple machine
and/or employee identification, etc. A sample .TXT file has been included for this tutorial.
DESIGN YOUR STENCIL
This multi-line stencil will consist of both “permanent” (lines that will appear on all stencils) and
“variable” (data that is to be imported) lines of text.
Since we are entering multiple lines, we will change the default [Y] coordinate, so that lines are
entered from the top down.
At a blank screen, left click on the Default Settings Bar at the top of the screen. Change the [Y]
coordinate to be 21.5. Say OK. Now, type [T] for text. Check the “Multiple Line” box.
We will first input the “permanent” lines of our tags.
Type “Part #” [Enter]; Type “Ship Date”[Enter]; Click on “OK”
Notice that consecutive lines were automatically placed below Line 1. When a line is inserted it
assumes the characteristics of its preceding line, (Height, Font, X location, etc.), with the exception
of the Y location.
If you want to change the font and height, you should do so now:
With your left mouse, drag a box around both lines of text to highlight.
Choose [F] for font. Select the desired font. While the lines are still highlighted, choose [H] for
height. Type in “1.5.”
Now we will create the “variable” lines of our stencil. The easiest way to do this is to copy the 2
lines of text on the screen and then edit the new, copied lines.
Drag a box around the 2 lines of text to highlight.
Go to Edit | Group | Step and Repeat.” The drop down menu will look like this:
The top of the menu represents the direction the
original text will be duplicated. Click on the
2nd box to copy to the right and below.
The X,Y Transposition fields are currently set to
0. For our stencil, the longest line (Ship Date)
is approximately 9 inches long, so we want the
copy to start around 9.5 inches, allowing for
space between the fields. Type in 9.5 in the X
field. Leave the Y at 0.
In the “Copies” field, leave the copy at 1.
Press “OK.”
The copied lines represent the variable lines and you will want to go to each line to edit/change to
equal the largest line of text you will be importing. Do this by clicking on the copied line, type [T]
for Text (to bring up the Text Edit menu), highlight the current text, then type in the longest line of
text in your .TXT file. Repeat for the 2nd copied line.
If you are creating multiple stencils, it is easy to “build in” the weed line that separates each
stencil.
Insert a new line: You can insert new lines by either hitting the “Esc” key, the “\” key or going to
“Edit” Insert Line.
Choose the [F4] Function Key for graphic. When the sub-menu comes up, select the “Box” graphic
in the list and say “OK.”
You will need to resize and re-position the graphic. The box in this example is 5.25” high by 21”
wide. Position the box over the lines of text to look like this:
When designing the layout,
use long name sample entries
that are expected from the
attached .TXT file for the
variable lines (the data that
will be imported).
Also, be sure to design your
template’s variable text fields
to correspond to the .TXT
field order.
Note:
.TXT files need to be stored in c:\Letter.
All tags should have the same number of text lines; empty lines are allowed, tabulation is
ignored.
Text can have up to 80 characters; the rest will be truncated.
Use the carriage return [Enter] as a line separator.
Now to replace our variable lines with the .TXT file:
Click on the 1st variable line (1234567890). Click on [T] and choose [F3] to change the text to be
the attached text file “Sample.TXT.” You will be prompted to enter the text maximum edit length.
In our sample, it is “10.”
Click on the 2nd variable line (00/00/0000) and follow the previous steps. Enter “10” when
prompted for the maximum edit length.
After making the editing changes, our tag is going to show the text file name instead of the text that
the tag was designed with.
Test your template and the attached file by going to [O] and then “Preview” to confirm that the
variable lines are in the correct order.
Now we will step and repeat the completed designed tag for optimal use of material.
For our example we will be making 16 tags total. Drag a box around all lines of text and the box to
highlight. Go to Edit | Group | Step and Repeat. Click on the 2nd box for copies to be made below
and to the right of the original. Leave the X and Y fields as is for now. Change the Column and
Rows to each be 4. Click on OK.
Obviously, if you wanted to leave
some space between the boxes for
cutting purposes, you would change
the X and Y fields to be slightly
larger than the defaulted size.
As you can see, we need to adjust our drawing size to include all of the new tags. Click on [D] for
drawing size and type in 100 for the width. All tags should appear on the screen. The program will
not output anything that does not show up within your drawing area.
Go to the [O] Output menu. Use the Tag Ctrl button to set the three Tag Control fields. Data Field
Count represents the number of variable lines per tag, and in our case, it would be set to 2. Tags per
Page would be 16 (4 rows x 4 columns). The page number is changed each time a set of tags is
produced.
NOTE: For our example, we are NOT going to cut this large project, HOWEVER, if we had
100” of material length to work with, we would simply confirm that our panel size matched our
drawing size, i.e. 100” long and 24” high. We would check “Stay at End of Plot” to keep the
cutting head from returning to the beginning of the job when finished, and then we would just
click on “Output Lines.” Since all of our lines are sequential, plotting would start at the bottom
left of the material and proceed in an orderly fashion to the end of the job which is at the top right
of the material and stop there.
For our example, we are going to assume we only need the first tag to be output. There are a couple
of ways to do this. When we created our file, we established a line order and we know that there are
5 lines of information (including the box) in the 1st tag. If you go to [O] Output and click on “Select
Lines,” it will bring up the Line Menu. You would just “Clear All” and re-check only the 1st 5 lines.
You may want to rotate this plot selection to conserve material. Then choose “Output Lines.”
Another way to output a desired portion of the project is to Set a Window. In the Output Menu,
choose “Set a Window.” You will return to your drawing area. Use your mouse to drag a box
around the area you want to plot. You will be returned to the Output menu. Choose “Window
Output.”
TUTORIAL NUMBER 4 –
Creating a Multi-line Stencil Using Stencil Templates
As mentioned in an earlier Tutorial, various templates have been included with the program. These
may be useful to you. We highly suggest that if you do use and modify the format of these files,
you save your file with a new name. Our files are NOT in “Read Only” format, so any changes you
make and save will affect the original file.