Beginner Jitters

While I agree that it’s not the first tool I would recommend, it is actually a pretty good tool. I primarily use Affinity Designer with Inkscape as a backup, but I can do basically everything I need in Silhouette Studio and the trace function is the easiest I’ve seen.

Silhouette Studio is extremely popular in many of the FB groups (this thread would look completely different there) and people run design businesses with it. It’s also much more user friendly to those who aren’t familiar with vector tools. The language just makes more sense to people. As for support, there is a huge Silhouette community and all the tutorials to go with it.

It may not be the MOST robust option, but it is both popular and very well documented.

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Interesting. Don’t you think though that the raster to vector engine would be the same as Inkscapes? I just assumed that the Gimp people went down the hall to the Inkscape office and cut and pasted it in. They are the same outfit. Hmmm…

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The biggest issue I have seen is the jaggies in the stack of pixels, vs actual change of direction of a line. If Inkscape were to find a ten degree change in direction and set a node at the corner, it will likely find a node at the end of each line of pixels and often a sharper change of direction, so the lines are a string of nodes that take much effort to clean up. By contrast Gimp, being built in raster is well aware of the distinction and have a node at actual corners, and deal competently with the jaggies caused at the rasters, or even modify the pixel tips. I used to spend time cleaning up JPGs trying to improve a result in Inkscape, before discovering that Gimp could do the job better, and even manipulate the line by say a one pixel offset that can be a mess in Inkscape especially in a line with a node at every pixel.

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Boy is that an understatement :slight_smile:

But that’s all good to know, thanks for the perspective. I’d still recommend one of the other players to anyone who wants to be an active forum user just based on how much more traffic they get here, but who knows, maybe that’s changing and SSBE is getting more market share these days.

I’m fairly comfortable letting the bulk of FB people stay right where they are, judging by the few times I’ve looked at the content there.

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Thank you @ben1 , I truly appreciate this advice. Is this something that I might try and have spare parts on hand if my business grows to that level? If so, do you have experience or do you know of a place I can look up parts that commonly wear out?

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All the spare parts are on the Glowforge shop. If you need something that isn’t listed you will have to contact support.

The forums here will be your best bet to get a list of parts you might want. Off the top of my head, I would say a black lid cable, rollers, and a belt. I think those are all Support requests.

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Don’t throw money at the problem by just getting fancy apps like adobe.

Inkscape has a learning curve and it took a while before I liked it better then design space. I use to be an avid cricuter. Design space grooms users to a different idea of design and certainly more UI friendly then inkskape. But then there is the world of Etsy where you can just search for design ideas (append “SVG” to the idea) and you will have way better options then design space and you will but supporting a more small business community.

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Just very recently changed :slight_smile: Inkscape does better on my Mac now and equal usability as Affinity or Adobe.

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Focus on growing your business first. If you bought a new machine and it has trouble then GF will replace it and make sure its not an inconvenience or causes down time. When under warranty I don’t think they are as willing just to send you parts and let you fix it your self. They just rather replace it and fix it at the warehouse…just from personal experience. No matter what, I feel like its safe to say they are case by case in handling and they seem to actually care about the owner.

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This is the main reason I bought the business edition. Other than the fact that I’ve been using silhouette studio for years. I cannot, for the life of me figure out how to trace things in any other program. At least not easily. That trace function is worth it to me. Sometimes I just need an outline of something. Two clicks and it’s done!

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It is very easy and powerful to do this in Gimp. There are many tools and means to create masks that turn easily into paths that can be exported as vectors as SVGs.