Cameo Plugin for Illustrator

Send artwork from Adobe Illustrator straight to a Silhouette cutting machine - no Silhouette Studio round-trip, no export step.

Status: Help needed to test with real hardware. The full pipeline works end to end in simulation and is covered by tests, but it has not yet been run against a physical cutter. Treat the first real cut as a calibration exercise — see Before your first real cut.

Key features

• Cut straight from Illustrator. No exporting, no Studio round-trip.
• 19 machines supported — Cameo 1–5 (including Plus, Pro and Alpha), Cameo Pro MK-II, Portrait 1–4, Craft Robo and Silhouette SD. See Supported devices.
• Honest preview. Preview decodes the actual command stream the machine would receive and draws it back as geometry, so you see what the cutter will do, not an approximation of it. Preview never moves the machine.
• Material presets from the driver's own table — picking a material sets pressure, speed and blade depth on the machine, and the swatch shows the blade cap Silhouette recommends.
• Your artwork is never modified. Text is outlined automatically on a temporary duplicate.
• Nothing is silently dropped. Anything that can't be cut is listed in the panel rather than quietly skipped.
• Bounding box only traces just the outline of your design — a cheap sanity check on scrap before committing an expensive sheet.
• Cut without a mat reorders cuts so the material isn't pulled apart by a cut upstream of where the blade still has to travel.
• Dry run simulates a job end to end without moving the cutter.
• No Homebrew, no pip, no libusb install. Everything the panel needs is bundled.

Installing

Grab the .zxp extension from the latest release, then install it with a ZXP installer such as ZXP Installer and restart Illustrator completely.

Full step-by-step instructions, including troubleshooting and uninstalling, are in INSTALL.md.

Requirements: macOS 11 or newer, Adobe Illustrator 2020 (24.0) or newer, and any Python 3.9+ on your Mac. Everything else is inside the .zxp.

How to use

1. Connect your Silhouette by USB and switch it on. The panel header shows the model with a green dot when it finds one.
2. Select the paths you want to cut. With nothing selected, the whole artboard is used.
3. Pick a material. This sets pressure, speed and blade depth on the machine; the swatch shows the recommended blade cap.
4. Press Preview to see exactly what the machine would cut, decoded back from the command stream it would receive.
5. Press Send to Silhouette.

What gets cut

Paths, compound paths and groups cut directly. Text is outlined automatically (on a temporary duplicate — your artwork is never modified). Guides are skipped, as is anything hidden or locked — including artwork that only inherits that state from a hidden or locked layer, which Illustrator does not mark on the items themselves.

Placed images, symbols, blends and envelopes cannot be cut and are reported in the panel rather than silently dropped. Expand them first (Object → Expand).

Clipping masks are ignored: everything inside a clipped group is cut, not just the visible part.

Before your first real cut

The first cut on a real machine is the one thing simulation cannot stand in for.

1. Cut a 10 mm calibration square on scrap and measure it. This is what catches unit and scaling errors.
2. Run Bounding box only on a real design with the blade removed or pressure at 1.
3. Then cut for real.

Placement is worth checking too. The driver offsets designs by each machine's physical media margins, which differ per model — an original Cameo shifts 9 mm across, the Cameo 5 family 6 mm the other way. The panel tells you when your model does this, and the Offset X and Y fields correct it.

Supported devices

All 19 machines below are driven by the vendored inkscape-silhouette driver and covered by per-model wire-protocol snapshot tests, so the exact byte stream each one receives is pinned in CI.

Functional testing on physical hardware required The table below is what a device report fills in — whether it worked or not.

Legend: ✅ confirmed on hardware · ⚠️ reported with issues · ⚪ not yet reported

Machine	Cut width	Tested	Notes
Silhouette Cameo	304 mm	⚪	Shifts designs 9 mm across, 1 mm down
Silhouette Cameo 2	304 mm	⚪
Silhouette Cameo 3	304.8 mm	⚪
Silhouette Cameo 4	304.8 mm	⚪
Silhouette Cameo 4 Plus	372 mm	⚪
Silhouette Cameo 4 Pro	600 mm	⚪
Silhouette Cameo 5	330.2 mm	⚪	Shifts designs 6 mm the other way
Silhouette Cameo 5 Plus	372 mm	⚪
Silhouette Cameo 5 Alpha	330.2 mm	⚪	Shifts 6 mm; higher max pressure (40)
Silhouette Cameo 5 Alpha Plus	372 mm	⚪	Shifts 6 mm; higher max pressure (40)
Silhouette Cameo Pro MK-II	609 mm	⚪
Silhouette Portrait	206 mm	⚪
Silhouette Portrait 2	203 mm	⚪
Silhouette Portrait 3	203 mm	⚪
Silhouette Portrait 4	216 mm	⚪
Craft Robo CC200-20	200 mm	⚪
Craft Robo CC300-20	not recorded	⚪	Legacy; no registration-mark support
Silhouette SD 1	not recorded	⚪	Legacy; no registration-mark support
Silhouette SD 2	not recorded	⚪	Legacy; no registration-mark support

Cut widths and margins come from the driver's own device table; "not recorded" means the driver does not carry a width for that model.

Limitations

• macOS only for now. The transport layer is structured for Windows, but Windows needs care: the usual approach there replaces the driver with Zadig, which breaks Silhouette Studio until reverted. The better path is to talk through usbprint.sys directly, avoiding the swap — designed for, not built.
• No Print & Cut. Registration-mark sensing is supported by the underlying driver but not yet wired up in the panel.
• No Bluetooth. The driver supports it on Linux and Windows; macOS lacks the Python RFCOMM socket support it relies on.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md, and docs/development.md for the architecture and the developer workflow.

The single most useful thing you can contribute is a device report, whether it worked or not. This supports 19 machines that no one person owns, so a confirmed "Portrait 3 cuts correctly" genuinely helps.

Licence

GPL-2.0. This project vendors GPL-2.0 code from fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette, so the combined work is GPL-2.0. See LICENSE.

Enormous credit to the inkscape-silhouette maintainers — the hard part of this problem is theirs, solved years ago.