This is a warning to prospective Alibre CAM license purchasers.
There is a lot to like about Alibre CAM.
BUT, if you expect it to be as elegant in producing engraved text as many other much less costly programs that offer text engraving as a central feature, you will be disappointed.
First and foremost: Alibre CAD can not deal with single line fonts. If you create any type of single line sketch, you will get an error "popup" and the feature will not be created when you try to extrude or cut it.
Second: If you create a sketch with single line fonts, or entities, on it, Alibre CAM will actually accept the operation and generate a tool path, but the tool will not cut anything. This is in direct contrast to the misleading cAM tutorials.
When you complain, Alibre support will tell you to use a conventional font and then explode it in order to create text. They are correct in that this process works. However, when you explode any significant amount of text, it is converted to poly lines and the magnitude of your file may increase geometrically. This will, in turn, make your nice fast CAD system into a slug because of the thousands of drawing command this entails which must be redrawn every time you do virtually anything.
Do not be fooled into believing that if you spend the thousands of dollars necessary to upgrade from Basic to any other level of Alibre CAM that it will work any different.
I do expect the get a lot of use out of Alibre CAM for what it does do, which is a lot. However, now I have to spend several hundred dollars more to acquire an engraving program which means that any operation which requires very much text and significant machine work, such as a large control panel with cut outs, will have to be done using two separate programs that do not communicate directly together. One of the main reasons to buy Alibre is the integration of CAD and CAM, which this defeats.
There is a lot to like about Alibre CAM.
BUT, if you expect it to be as elegant in producing engraved text as many other much less costly programs that offer text engraving as a central feature, you will be disappointed.
First and foremost: Alibre CAD can not deal with single line fonts. If you create any type of single line sketch, you will get an error "popup" and the feature will not be created when you try to extrude or cut it.
Second: If you create a sketch with single line fonts, or entities, on it, Alibre CAM will actually accept the operation and generate a tool path, but the tool will not cut anything. This is in direct contrast to the misleading cAM tutorials.
When you complain, Alibre support will tell you to use a conventional font and then explode it in order to create text. They are correct in that this process works. However, when you explode any significant amount of text, it is converted to poly lines and the magnitude of your file may increase geometrically. This will, in turn, make your nice fast CAD system into a slug because of the thousands of drawing command this entails which must be redrawn every time you do virtually anything.
Do not be fooled into believing that if you spend the thousands of dollars necessary to upgrade from Basic to any other level of Alibre CAM that it will work any different.
I do expect the get a lot of use out of Alibre CAM for what it does do, which is a lot. However, now I have to spend several hundred dollars more to acquire an engraving program which means that any operation which requires very much text and significant machine work, such as a large control panel with cut outs, will have to be done using two separate programs that do not communicate directly together. One of the main reasons to buy Alibre is the integration of CAD and CAM, which this defeats.