Exporting vector content to SSDE with a Mac

Silhouette Studio Designer Edition is limited in terms of the vector file formats it can read, but by making use of an online converter, we can change popular formats such as EPS and PDF to SVG. We can also use this in conjunction with the Mac’s built in PDF generation to extract vector content from many online sources. Here’s a video to demonstrate the process.

Update: The Ideogram site now generates SVGs (just click the More Options button) so you do not need this technique for that site, but these steps are still applicable for other sites with vector PDF content.

Here are the written steps for starting with a vector PDF (this also works on a Windows machine as an alternate to “print to SVG”):

-Open or generate your printable *vector* content. (see list of suggested sources in this post)

We used Ideogram’s free online template maker for the video

-Enter your dimensions and click the Create button

-Press the Save button (disk icon). The PDF will save to your Downloads folder with the name “template”

-Go to the Misc2SVG file converter site.

-Click the Choose File button and select the PDF you just saved and click Open.

-Press the Senden button.

-Click the Download link.

-Control-click (or right click) the resultant SVG and select Save As or Save Page As.

-Enter a name and location for your file and click Save.

-From Silhouette Studio, open the SVG file you just saved.

-Click to select the SVG and then on the Cut Styles Pane click Cut. If no lines turn red, click the ungroup button one or more times and try again.

-Click the Scale button and enter 80% in the custom window. Click Apply. This will return templates from Ideogram to their exact size for cutting.

Here are the written steps for vector content that can be printed, such as from Wordle.net:

-Create your Wordle and press the Print button at the bottom of the page.

-Click the PDF button, it will pull down and then you can click Save as PDF.

-Name the file, give it a location and click the Save button.

-Go to the Misc2SVG file converter site.

-Click the Choose File button and select the PDF you just saved and click Open.

-Press the Senden button.

-Click the Download link.

-Command-click (or rightclick) the resultant SVG and select Save Page As.

-Enter a name and location for your file and click Save.

-From Silhouette Studio, open the SVG file you just saved .

-Select the SVG and on the Cut Styles Pane click Cut Edge. If no lines turn red, click the ungroup button one or more times and try again.

-Remove the background and make other edits as desired. Additional ungrouping may be necessary before you can do this.

In the video, we also drag the Wordle PDF to the mat to use for extracting colors. Select all the letters you want a certain color, then click the eye dropper and the color sample. Repeat for each color.