My brother just bought a Cricut cutting machine for his wife's birthday because she is into scrapbooking. He, being a graphic designer and moderately interested in helping me build cardstock terrain, had the idea of using it to cut out pieces of cardstock (the famous ulterior motive for giving the woman you love a birthday present). He said he was going to take the pdf's, trace the outlines and convert it to what he called a vector graphic (I think that's what he called it), connect the machine to his computer, and have the machine cut it out. By loading the same printed pdf, it should cut out the shapes on the printed page exactly. We haven't tried it yet, but will keep the forum informed of our progress. I have a feeling it would probably just be easier to use a razor and straightedge, but if it works, it could possibly save time if we were making something with a lot of same shaped pieces.

Yeah, I used a Graphtec CraftROBO to do some test print-and-cuts for a potential tangible product like LD2062 said.

In my experience, Cricuts, Silhouettes, and Wishblades are meant for scrapbookers, and they really do reflect that...meaning they're kind of worthless unless you just want to cut out prepaid canned stuff like lace doily page appliques for your latest scrapbook. I don't recommend using any of these machines unless you're a masochist or you hate yourself, because you don't need any of the extra scrapbooking froufrou.

The CraftROBO is the best out of the lot, but even it isn't without its own problems, as Highland Piper can attest. I got used to mine quickly because I used to work with large Roland cutting plotters back in the 1990s, so I was able to apply some of that experience towards troubleshooting the thing and working around common problems.

I have a troubleshooting site for the CraftROBO here:

http://melspapercraft.weebly.com/index.html

Everything there is the result of my blood, sweat, and tears.

I also posted a review of the CraftROBO on my forum a while back:

http://www.ebblesminiatures.com/forum/v ... p?tid=1547

Note that the review was written before I developed the troubleshooting site, so the troubleshooting site addresses a few of the issues raised in my review.

The bottom line for me is that it's not a terribly useful purchase for the kind of stuff Denny and I do. Offering GSD content suitable for the Robo Master software is more of a pain in the butt than it's worth, because you have to do separate versions for both A4 and US Letter, and GSD files don't compress graphics. That means about 20MB per page for each format. You can't really sell that at a price anyone would be willing to pay.

Now, if you're pretty handy with vector programs, you could in theory import the PDF pages into Robo Master or Illustrator, using the right paper format for your hardware, trace the cut and fold lines, and then Bob would be your uncle. However, doing that takes a lot more time and effort than just breaking out the ruler and X-Acto, so it'd only be useful for sets in which you really need a LOT of duplicate items. And I mean, like, a LOT of duplicate items. Otherwise, it's faster and simpler to just cut the things out by hand.

-Mel

Listen to sage Mel...he's really looked hard into this one. The technology isn't quite mature enough for on-the-fly cutting on this scale or of this complexity just yet. One day it will get there though, I have no doubt (and our fingers will be thankful).

The really infuriating thing is...it's *so* close to being practical for home use, but it's like 3 inches shy of the mark without a lot of help from the developer side.

If they came out with a newer CR model that was around the $200 mark or less, capable of feeding, scanning, and cutting multiple sheets from a feed tray, and the software was capable of dealing with multipage documents, that would be the perfect time for developers to embrace downloadable CraftROBO content. Until then, it's pretty much just something that's better suited to an office than a home.

-Mel