Hey everyone, so when designing certain things, precision is key. When I design things on Affinity Designer, I’ll sometimes need a precise size. I’ll make sure to save it and check off the option to keep the resolution but when uploaded to app.glowforge, it decides to just kinda make it whatever size it wants? Is there a reason for that? Because now I can’t laser it they way i need to at the size it was intended to be =\
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Within the comments of the AD scaling post you’ll also find that people had success starting projects with a 10.5" x 19" page template - that overrides DPI and scaling - plus you know you’re art will fit no matter what function you’re doing
That works no matter what program you’re using
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unfortunately I didn’t get much help from this =. I tried like all of the different things, such as setting the DPI to 96, setting the canvas size to exactly what I need it, checking or unchecking to keep document resolution, and just about every time I do it, it’s like a totally random size when I upload it, which confuses me even more D:
I just tried exporting from Affinity Design with the following post in mind and my 1" square box and 3" circle remained those sizes when I dragged them onto the Glowforge workspace. 
bdm1
Okay, I think you nailed it!
One way to avoid mucking around with post-processing the SVG is to click the More button on the Export pane. Set “Use DPI” to 96 instead of document resolution, unset “Set viewBox”, and while we’re in here might as well set “Export text as curves”. Click Manage Presets to add a preset, name it Glowforge, and use that from then on. The result is no viewBox parameter is set on the root node and the width/height is set in pixels at 96 DPI. Result imports at the right size.
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I followed these settings exactly while also making sure the measurements within my affinity design were 7in by 7in as I wanted (and not feet,pt, cm, or anything else), and weirdly enough, when I uploaded them to Glowforge, they were unusually HUGE 
. I’m gonna try these exact settings again to see if maybe I missed something in the tiredness/frustration of this last night.
You could post your file and an Affinity Design expert (not me by a long shot) could help you. Make sure you click the “more” button on the export page before doing the settings.
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Could you please post the file you’re running into trouble with? We’ll be glad to take a closer look. We aren’t experts in Affinity Designer, but lots of people here in the forum can help.
here it is!
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A few things…
First, I’m using Illustrator.
But, I immediately notice a few things just about the file as a whole:
There is nothing defining the workspace area in the SVG, and then the units are in pixels and scaled to 100%; basically, it’s trying to fit everything into a box in the browser.
Your dashed line won’t come in as dashed, because it’s an appearance only - not an actual dashed line. It needs the appearance to be expanded.
You have clipping masks. Those are going to disappear when you upload and whatever was masked behind the clipping mask, is now going to be visible.
For some reason, the drinks came in as transparent objects for me. That may be because discourse can change files when they are uploaded… not sure.
The font is going to be difficult to engrave as a vector, the grunge type fonts create a ton of very small elements that are difficult for the app to interpret - just one I’m looking at here is about .0043".
You have a few things more going on than just importing in at the correct size.
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Unfortunately, our team doesn’t have expertise in Affinity Designer.
If you create a file in a vector design software like Inkscape, you can expect the scale to be maintained when you upload it to the Glowforge app.
I know some of our customers are using Affinity Designer to design. I don’t see an exact match for your question, but I expect you could find a helpful tutorial in the Tips and Tricks area of our community forum. If not, you could post on the forum and see if someone has suggestions for you.
I’m going to close this thread - if you have another question, go ahead and post a new topic.