Hoping someone can help me…I want to do an engrave of a rectangle with text in it. The thing is, I want the rectangle to be engraved, but not the text. I’ve tried a number of things in Illustrator but no luck yet. Help?
Thanks!
edz
1 Like
have you made the colors different from one another? (and what do you want to do with the text?)
Make the text WHITE, the square BLACK. The black will be engraved, the white will not.
And don’t forget to either rasterize the rectangle and text afterwards, or subtract the text from the black rectangle. 
1 Like
oh, duh I was thinking he meant a bounding box rectangle, didn’t think of an entire area around text.
Yes, the background rectangle was black and the text was white. When I brought it into the GF interface the entire rectangle was highlighted…from experience that means it will engrave the entire rectangle.
I had always gotten best results from rasterizing and then image tracing to make it vector again but get rid of the layer effect
I will try the rasterizing…thanks!
out of curiosity, does the gf accept .ai or no… never thought to try?
convert the text to paths, then FILL the paths white.
No…have to feed it svg. 
A lot of things it doesn’t support yet. Trying to do this, I tried to use a mask and it wouldn’t take that either.
do you mean outlines?
No the forge does not accept outlines, nor text in an SVG, unless you convert the text to paths. If it’s a path with a white fill, and the background is black, it should ‘engrave’ the black and leave the white alone.
it has always worked for me when I click “Type > Create Outlines” and then I just save as svg
I suppose illustrator ‘outlines’ is the same as inkscape ‘paths’?
most likely
I’m not quite sure about how Illustrator handles something like this. If it is kept as a vector and saved as an svg, a white filled object will still be engraved if it is kept as a vector. Or does Illustrator automatically delete the fill from the text? A white filled object would not be engraved only if it was saved as a raster, or am I missing something.
For engraving vector fills, any color at all, including white, will translate as an engrave. That doesn’t happen for a raster image though, white is ignored, so the easiest way to deal with text, which usually has a multiple compound path situation, is to just place the white text in front of the black background, select both and then rasterize it. It creates exactly the engraving effect that you want.
The vector alternative is to make sure that the white areas are subtracted from the black, and that can be tricky to do and takes a lot longer.
1 Like
it tries to engrave like it is an object, but you can set to ignore cause it is a different color to the black
I would go about it like so (I know there a better way but why fix something not broke)
make rectangle in black
create text in white
Type > Create Outlines
place where you want
rasterize
image trace on default (only default if you want plain black and white)
save as svg and print
1 Like