How do you print dielines on polyester, etc.

[chknlegs]

Hi boys and girls,

We are currently printing our dielines on polyester film using a vinyl cutter with a pen instead of a blade. We submit this with our print job. I cannot use my diemaker to do this because he makes dies the old fashion way and doesn't have any proofing equipment.

I plot a 1 bit tiff or regular tiff, then auto-retrace it in the vinyl cutter's software. It is accurate but there are extra steps that I'm sure can be avoided with another setup. Is anyone doing this another way? I've heard of using wide format printers for this but I'd rather not do it this way.

I can use the dieline feature in Rampage but only when I trap. Also when sending Illustrator files through to this vinyl cutter, all dashed strokes don't output correctly. That is why I make a bitmap file and re-trace it.

Any suggestions would be great! thanks!

chknlegs

[TigerPress]

We print the dielines on clear film using an Epson 10000 inkjet. The clear film has an coating to accept the inkjet ink. It's sold by Epson, but I'm sure it would work in most inkjet printers.