Since one of the primary differentiators the Glowforge has is the dual camera system, the way it perhaps should work is to let that optical hardware do its job and figure out where and how big the material is, and let us specify precisely where on that piece we want the design placed, with some presets for horizontal/vertical centering, and a way to specify a rotation angle relative to the orientation of the piece. I am hoping/expecting the macro camera will be capable of better positional accuracy than a mechanical jig can provide, although there is still great value in using a jig to minimize any loss in accuracy from it needing to draw horizontal and vertical lines on angles instead of in line with its axes.
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That’s kinda my feeling, adapt my workflow to the tool instead of wanting the tool to adapt to my established methods.
I expect the solution that glow forge will present us with will be eloquent and have all of the capability we could ask for.
If not, there is always a jig.
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I could easily just say “THIS” and be done with it. I hadnt even thought this far in, but I know if it did not have this fuctionality, once I started using it I would quickly add this to the wish list. I cant tell you the sheer excitement this post induced.
If they are reliably and accurately able to allow me to offset my print from the edges of the material and maintain a parallel or right angle to the edge of the material without having to even use a jig, that would be beyond amazing. Auto aligning a cut to an edge with be such a boon, not only for precisions sake, but also in material savings. All of my expectations will be met and surpassed if this will be possible (considering the other promises they made are kept).
I would favorite this post 100 times if I could.
@dan… is this on the docket? Will this be a feature of the glowforge software?
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Sure, the Glowforge might be the first software ever that simply does everything you could ever dream of automatically. It’s possible. I just kind of wish we will have the ability to type in some numbers if that isn’t the case. It looks like I’ve been outvoted again though. 
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No one really knows how anything other than the most basic camera assisted positioning is intended to work. Guaranteed to be lots of different use cases and applications. Don’t stress, I’m sure there is a current or future capability that will allow you to type in a number for something. 
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I thought I could be sure about that too, but popular opinion seems to be that it’s not needed (or worse: something that should be avoided).
All I know is that I WILL see the software, in use, before my Glowforge is shipped. If numbers aren’t editable, I’ll be getting a refund.
Clearly you haven’t noticed how often the popular opinion is wrong here.
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In his usual understated fashion @rpegg has hit the nail on the head.
Popular opinion on these forums is based upon scraps of information passed around in an overheated game of telephone. By the time it has been repeated and modified 5 times it bears little relationship to the original comment, let alone the actual truth.
I highly doubt that “popular opinion” has much effect on the schedule for rolling out features, or on the list of features that Glowforge will be developing.
I agree that parametric input for cut positioning is a powerful and important feature, but I will still want a Glowforge without it. If this one is a show stopper for you then you will have to wait with the rest of us and see how the software ends up working. Of course the way it works on ship day may be very different than the way it works 3 months later…
Not at all! Sorry for the lack of details in my suggestion above. The mention of presets for centering was by no means all that I expected to be available. I can absolutely see a need to both specify exact dimensions for the image/illustration to be engraved, as well as arbitrary offsets from the camera-determined 0,0 point. The presets would just do the math for you for the most likely/common alignments, and auto-populate those offsets based on the measured size of the blank and the size of the illustration going on it.
Also, on further thought, a jig would still be very useful to speed up repetitive engraves, so that you can do the camera-aided alignment once, and then just carefully replace the blanks to reuse that alignment.
Just to toss the idea out there…how they do it in the craft cutter world…those machines use an optical eye (camera) to locate 3 specifically placed Registration Marks. The marks are placed at three corners of the paper as a final (optional) step and they define a relationship between the paths for the item to be cut and those three marks for correct orientation. That lets you print something on a regular printer along with the 3 Registration marks at the outside edges of the paper, and then put it into the cutter and send a cut command. The cutter searches for, and finds those marks, orients itself, and cuts out perfectly around the printed image.
It’s pretty slick. Makes it easy to perfectly align engraving, etching, stitching holes, do pen work…that sort of thing.
Maybe something like that would be easier to incorporate into the currently designed Glowforge software than trying to set a specific grid location. (Might be something for down the road, since the programming already exists out there.) 
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Our approach is simple - our first priority is delivering what we told you we’d deliver you you already. If you need something and we haven’t said we’re going to build it, please do let us know so we can get you a refund.
After we’ve done what we said we’re going to do, then we’ll triage the feature hopper. And this stuff is in the hopper.
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given the number of ideas thrown out here in the forums, wouldn’t it be more climb the feature mountain and see which ones you might be brining down to us masses?
It’s in the hopper… Sweet. That’s good enough for me =)
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@dan Is there a uservoice page, or similar “public wishlist”, that you are using to prioritize what goes in the hopper? I haven’t seen mention of one, but a very helpful tool to let you gauge which features people actually care about instead of mining the forums for suggestions and guessing at overall interest.
Would be cool to be able to have access to the forum archive in such a way as to automate searches for “hopper”, “feature”, “request” and build some word clouds and other nifty data visualizations to see just what features are going to come standard at release and what might have to wait. Just thinking out loud on how to collate all this information. I wonder what kind of project management software the Glowforge team is using. Do they use Slack and how do they use it? Seriously, I keep thinking that having an official archivist and historian for the Glowforge project would be amazing. Is there literally a hopper that has scraps of paper and back of envelope notes piling up some where? How do they do task management? On a personal note, one of the biggest drawbacks of having an iPhone was that project management and productivity tools were not integrated into the experience from the onset. I was used to desktop computer task management tools and when I went more mobile, I lost some good habits because the task management routine I had been relying on didn’t sync well with an iPhone. But that’s a whole nother thread.
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There are at least 3 dozen things that were casually put in the hopper. But that said…
yeah we need to keep track of this hopper list!
for one of the public projects I was working on we made our agile process visible to the public with bugs and feature lists included so they could see what we were working on, and where it was in the queue
They could recommend stuff to be added to the list and if we liked it we moved it over into the queue
everyone was really happy with this system.
Sounds like a great system that could generate useful feedback. Clearly Glowforge has gone the other direction in transparency. Not going to comment on that since even though many of my projects were much larger than Glowforge none dealt with a fear of intellectual property loss. Though I have seen several classified projects with more visibility.
We were working on software for the crossfit community, and we were and continued to be the frontrunner in our space. Could our clients see our feature set and our planned features? yeah, but it was more important to us to keep the community… in the community.
Its a tradeoff, but we were ultimately developing this software for our customers, and this was the best proof that we were the best product in the market to pick.
Its not to say that a lot of the things we were doing werent groundbreaking in the industry either. We put a lot of never-before-seen things out there, so even our competitors knew it was coming. It still worked well and made everyone happy.