Anthromax’s executive staff requires nametags for public appearances and corporate meetings.

You recently purchased a Cyborg X-300 with an engraving area of 200 x 300 mm, and your materials supplier carries in their product range 200 x 300 mm engraving sheets in various colour combinations.

First thing you do is create one or more example layouts to present to the public relations or communications officer. It might also be a good idea to engrave some samples in different colours so they can judge what the final result will look like. As you are no doubt aware, engraving materials like Graflux 2 (R) offer a wide array of colour combinations. Let’s say in this case, your communications officer is opting for a black text on a metallic golden background.

When saving the example layouts, you can add the sample colours you are using in the file names or in the comments section of each job. For more info about the saving process and the comments section, please check the Save As section in this manual.

Once any of the layouts is accepted and the badge colour has been selected, our next stage will be to copy this specific layout and create as many copies as you need. In our example, let us say 30 nametags are needed.

• Material Dimensions: Here you will simply enter the size of your piece of material (or “sheet” as it is often called) as you purchased it from your vendor.
  In our example, the sheet size will be 300 mm wide by 200 mm high.
  
  
  
  
• Material Margins: As we explained in the general page on Multiplate, the main purpose of this margin is to avoid collision between your machine’s depth nose regulator and the bumper slabs on the left hand and back sides of you table.
  Also, when you are going to use the “Score Between Plates” option (see below), you need a minimal margin of material to cut.
  
  
  
  
• Interplate Margins: These margins can surve as a kind of buffer, compensating for the width of the cut. Most engraving machines allow you to cut the individual nametags to size using the machine itself with a specific V-shaped cutter, so in order to compensate for the intrinsic width of this V-shaped cut, you can enter an interplate margin. The same goes for cutting your nametags with a circular saw, if your sawblade is 2 mm thick, you will want to specify these 2 millimeters as your interplate margin.
  
  
  
  
• Multiplate Options - Number of Plates and Sheets:
  
  The only box you need to fill out – the other two are greyed out – is the Number of Plates, in our example: the number of badges you require.
  The Batches required indicates the number of pieces of material, the Plates per sheet specifies the number of badges you will be able to engrave out of one piece of material.
  
  
  
  
• Multiplate Options - Checkboxes:
  • Duplicate Plate 1:
    • Checked: Will copy the text from your first “Master” plate to all other plates in the multiplate. Very useful where you have to create a series of tags with identical or mainly identical texts, e.g. if you want to engrave a number of identical pictograms or badges for a public with only the organisation of the participants and the name of the event.
    • Unchecked: In our particular showcase, where all staff members have different names and functions, we will uncheck this option.
  • Plates go down first
  • Cut Plate Outline
  • Cut all borders last