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I am a design engineer. Often times my company recieves logos, text, etc. from other company's art departments in the form of an Illustrator file. Those logos and text then need to be put on a product and are often extruded as a 3D part on the product. Right now the only way to transfer the logo or lettering is to export the .ai file as an image file, such as a jpeg, then import the image file into Solidworks and create a sketch of the logo or lettering by tracing the image.
This is very time consuming, especially since often times the fonts are not ordinary fonts and have to be exact, so I am trying to figure out a better way to do this. I have tried exporting the .ai file as both DXF and DWG, then importing those files into Solidworks, but nothing shows up on the screen and no sketch is created. I think that Illustrator is either not exporting the files correctly, or it can't export them in the correct versions to be readable by Solidworks.
It is possible to create a text sketch in Solidworks and use whatever font is appropriate, but it would be much easier if I could create the logo and lettering with Illustrator, vectorize the text, and then import that as a sketch into Solidworks.
So, what I am looking for is either a cheap or open source utility that can convert .ai files into a format readable by Solidworks, such as STEP, IGES, or SWk.
Does anyone know if anything like this exists, or how to fix the problem of importing the DXF and DWG files?
I should add that I'm using Illustrator 10 and Solidworks 2003. We are upgrading to Solidworks Office 2005 soon, so maybe that will fix the problem...
This is very time consuming, especially since often times the fonts are not ordinary fonts and have to be exact, so I am trying to figure out a better way to do this. I have tried exporting the .ai file as both DXF and DWG, then importing those files into Solidworks, but nothing shows up on the screen and no sketch is created. I think that Illustrator is either not exporting the files correctly, or it can't export them in the correct versions to be readable by Solidworks.
It is possible to create a text sketch in Solidworks and use whatever font is appropriate, but it would be much easier if I could create the logo and lettering with Illustrator, vectorize the text, and then import that as a sketch into Solidworks.
So, what I am looking for is either a cheap or open source utility that can convert .ai files into a format readable by Solidworks, such as STEP, IGES, or SWk.
Does anyone know if anything like this exists, or how to fix the problem of importing the DXF and DWG files?
I should add that I'm using Illustrator 10 and Solidworks 2003. We are upgrading to Solidworks Office 2005 soon, so maybe that will fix the problem...