Hey, yep. I can almost garantee that your file will neeed to be outputted through illustrator anyway. Throughout the course of the year I prepare a fair number of files for etchwork (glass or stainless signage mostly) and it always needs to be a vector AI file with curves (type converted to shapes). But the flicker gallery SICKdimension showed, had some stuff that looked raster to me... perhaps vector isn't a requisite for some jobs/machines.
You'll probably find, however, that they are simply run through 'Live Trace' in illustrator or another proprietry program. problem with that is that the created paths need so much work that you were better off drawing from scratch in the first place. IME, auto-vectorising can leave very fine lines that show up in the etchwork even though they appear solid in workfile, rounds get flattenned, angles get sharpenned etc.
Hope it helps, wouldn't want to see you crapping up yr mac
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