Adobe Illustrator Plugin for Glowforge

Hi everyone,

Just became a Glowforge Pro owner yesterday and very happy to be part of this community. :slight_smile: Can’t wait for my Glowforge to arrive! Estimated date is August 2019 (I’m located in Israel).

I’ve digged into some threads in the forum to gather information and learn about the Glowforge in advanced, and was surprised to find out that the Glowforge’s control application is actually a web-based, which requires an internet connection in order to communicate with the Glowforge servers to operate the machine.

Personally, I own the Silhouette Cameo 3 and very pleased with Silhouette Connect - its local Adobe Illustrator plugin, which can be accessed from within Illustrator itself:

I’ve read these threads but haven’t found anyone asking about / suggesting a local plugin for Adobe Illustrator:

Standalone Control App

Internet access required?

Silhouette Cameo, Curio, Portrait or Mint and Glowforge Love

I for one think that everyone will appreciate such local solution which will make everything much more simpler, as users won’t even need to save SVG files and to drag/copy them to the web page, but to send the project for cutting directly from within Illustrator. It’s much more convenient. And besides, in my opinion I think that such expensive machine should at least have a plugin for a powerful application like Adobe Illustrator.

The Silhouette Connect plugin for example calls an external window to operate the Silhouette machines. I trust that Glowforge development team could come up with such plugin too. If not a for a local solution just yet then at least to integrate the web-based page within a plugin for the time being, and further on to update it to be a local solution as I think it’s a must. People should be able to operate the machine even without an internet connection.

I would really like to hear what Glowforge support team and the community think.

Many thanks!

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Welcome to the community! I was in Israel on vacation a few months ago; I can’t wait till we’re able to deliver there to you.

We actually built an Illustrator plugin, but we found that Adobe repeatedly changed interfaces in ways that prevented it from working. Ultimately we decided to put that effort towards other projects that would consume fewer resources.

However, in many (but not all) versions of illustrator, you can copy with ctrl-C, then paste the results into app.glowforge.com into your design library, for instant uploads.

Hope this helps!

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