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 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:

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.