The customer sent an EPS. It still will not cut.
The file extension tells you what the container is, not what is inside it. A JPG dragged into Illustrator and saved out as EPS is an EPS file with a photograph in it — and a plotter has nothing to follow.
This is the single most common reason a job stalls after the customer swears they sent vector. They are not lying to you. They opened it, it looked right, and nobody ever told them the difference.
Four checks before it reaches the plotter
Thirty seconds, and it saves the reprint conversation.
Open the file and click a single letter or element. If you can select and move it on its own, it is vector. If clicking anywhere selects one rectangle covering the whole artwork, you have an image in a wrapper.
Vector edges stay crisp at any magnification. A wrapped bitmap goes soft and blocky. This takes three seconds and settles it.
Live text needs the font installed on your machine. If it is not, the plotter substitutes something else and the customer gets lettering they did not approve. Text should arrive as paths.
A trace often leaves unclosed contours and specks too small to see at fit-to-screen. The plotter will happily try to cut every one of them.
When it fails the checks
You have three options and they are not equivalent. Send it out and wait a day. Redraw it yourself and lose half an hour. Or convert it, look at the paths, and decide in seconds whether it holds up.
The third one is not always the answer — but it tells you which of the other two you actually need, before you have committed to either.
Convert a customer file freeExports as SVG, DXF, EPS and PDF. No account needed for the first one.
What sign shops ask
Because the extension describes the container, not the contents. A raster image placed in Illustrator and saved as EPS is an EPS file containing a bitmap. It still needs tracing before anything can be cut from it, which is why it usually attracts an art charge.
Depends on the software driving it, but the common set is Illustrator, EPS with real paths, PDF with live vector, SVG, DXF and PLT. What matters is not the extension, it is whether the geometry inside is paths.
If the PDF still contains vector paths, yes. If it was exported from a photo or a scan, it is a picture in a PDF wrapper and behaves exactly like the EPS above.
Cut vinyl has no gradients — a colour is a piece of material or it is not there. Artwork with shading either gets simplified to flat cuttable shapes, or the job moves to print-and-cut. Deciding which is a conversation with the customer, not a file problem.
Convert what they sent and look at the result before you commit. Flat logos with defined edges usually come through cleanly enough to cut. A photo of a painted van, a faded decal or a hand-drawn mark still needs someone to redraw it — charge for that, it is real work.
Sort by difficulty rather than by customer. Clean artwork goes through automatic conversion in seconds; the genuinely hard files go to whoever does your art. Most shops find the clean group is the majority, and it is the one that was quietly costing either money or hours.
If signage and vinyl is your business, you are probably paying per file.
An outside art service charges 6 to 26 dollars a logo and comes back the next day. Redrawing it yourself costs half an hour you could bill. A year here is $49 for 25 conversions every month, every machine format included, which works out cheaper than two outsourced logos.
Everything on this page stays free. This is only worth it if you do volume.