kaom, If I have to I can do it that way - I was hoping to find somethin' on the net for free that would work - If I have to I can write code to do it with a B&W either .bmp or .tif; I recall writing some raster recognition code for bitmapped fonts a long time ago which wasn't so hard, but that will have to wait for my Tiffer utility to be completed and I'll have to learn the .ai spec to do do it so that would be a while before I could get to it. I think also that the seperate views if I can ever get them into C2 will work better as booleans in the assembly room rather than the vertex modeler once ported in as spline objects. I know there has been some talk on the forums in the past about bools not working right in C2 but I've seen that they can work properly, so I think patence is the key there. as a BTW, I finally got TCad 4 working right again, (in compatability options - only disable advanced options and get the old MFC42.DLL to put in the TCAD directory - (in case anyone else reading this is interested) but the closest to .ai i could get it to save in even after getting it to work in XP was .dfx. It's supposed to support .wmf saves but so far no luck with that. LOL The last time I tried to get support from IMSI on it they said," You know we're on version nine, now?" So I don't suppose there's much help there as even now they're on version 10. In the meantime I'll look around a bit more for a free R2V converter but I'll probably just end up just tracing onto a new layer as you say. Thanks, - TJ