Now I really am confused! You have an electronic drawing in some format, you pay someone to print it full-size, then you manually digitise it with a high-quality (i.e. expensive) digitising board, then you import that into Aspire. I must have missed something here.

Quite coincidentally, earlier today my wife asked me if I could produce an outline drawing of some paper templates she was using but scaled up by a factor of 2. As it happened the largest fitted on to A4 so I scanned it to a bitmap which is possibly equivalent to your own starting point. Then I imported the bitmap straight into Vectric Vcarve (which I believe to be a cut-down version of Aspire so I would guess that Aspire can do anything Vcarve can do). It took at least 30 seconds to convert the bitmap to a vector outline although one of the pieces took a couple of minutes longer to node-edit the outline as the scan wasn't quite so clean. I now have a vector drawing which I am about to export into something that will let me print it at the size I want (as Vcarve isn't very clever when it comes to printing designs to a given size) as my wife wants to cut out larger paper patterns. However, I could equally well have generated a toolpath to take to the router to cut, say, plywood templates (and I have done this quite often in the past - my wife comes up with these little projects for me!).

But the idea of printing, manually digitising, and then going back to the Vectric software? That's why I thought that there must be something special about the digitising process. I'm certainly not blowing my own horn either - it's so simple and obvious that I just assumed that everyone did it that way and that I had missed something.

Doesn't take anything away from your finished products which look great. It's just that I can't understand why there is the manual stage in the middle!