Today I struggled to get raster data out of CorelDraw and into the laser software, Retina Engrave 3D. It’s supposed to work, but I was consistently getting a blank screen on the Raster Engrave tab.

I hope there’s a better way, but here’s what worked for me: I exported the drawing to PDF, opened the PDF file with Adobe Reader, and printed to the Full Spectrum Engineering Driver from Adobe Reader.

In my case, the data I wanted to raster was actually text in a strange font. For the PDF trick to work for text, I had to install the font on the Colaser computer. I might have been able to work around that by converting the text to curves in CorelDraw, but once I found a combination that worked I was anxious to actually make some parts.

I also figured out that if you hit the J key to run a box on the laser, the software will forget that you had it set to Raster then Vector mode. If you set Raster then Vector mode and immediately hit G (or the play button on screen) then it really does raster then vector, as advertised.