Is there a way to have the GF UI auto recognize interior holes in parts when I upload a SVG or PDF file?
I prefer to cut interior holes in a part first, before cutting the exterior lines and freeing the part from the stock. I understand how setting the stroke color in Inkscape determines the cut order, but I’m hoping for a more automated way to find/set the color on all the interiors holes so they can cut first.
After exporting [Onshape] CAD drawings of parts, if I didn’t need to use Inkscape as a middle step to color interior lines it would make iterations much easier. Or if a part has tons of interior holes (for example, a really fancy snowflake, or something that looked like lace) then all those little holes wouldn’t need to be manually selected to change the color so they can cut first.
Making the interior and exterior cuts separate operations as you describe is the only way I have been able to control that. If it’s all one operation, the exterior cut always seems to go first. Maybe someone else has other suggestions.
Note that you could change the color of the exterior cut rather than trying to select and change a lot of small interior cuts. You can drag to reorder them in the GFUI, if needed.
@evermorian Thank you for thinking “outside the box”. This could certainly be a better option to change the color of the outside instead of inside lines. (Unfortunately it would need to be re-done again with each update/iteration of parts.)
Is there a way to select the outside lines in a click or two? Even if there’s lots of parts this could still help.
You know, I haven’t really noticed it being necessary to cut the interior lines first. Unless you are cutting something extremely lightweight like paper or fabric (in which case you really need to have it stuck down to a cutting mat), the materials I’ve been working with are heavy enough to not shift in the air assist, and you don’t need to cut the inside ones first.
The laser beam isn’t going to hang up in the material and shift it. (We did used to have to worry about that when cutting with digital cutters, but those had knives that could hang up in the material.)
@jules has a good point: the laser doesn’t exert any significant physical pressure while cutting. So, it’s usually not required like in most CNC cutting.
I can think of several quick ways to select the exterior. The details are likely dependent on what software you are using. I can usually just click on the outline then, right-click in my Glowforge color palette to set the line color.
If the outline is difficult to click to select for some reason, Corel Draw has a panel called Object Manager that lets me select it from a list.
I haven’t used recent versions of AI or Inkscape much recently. They likely have similar options.
Thanks for the suggestion! We haven’t announced anything like that yet, but I’m going to send it to our product team with a note that it came from a customer request. I’m going to close this thread - if you have any other questions go ahead and post a new topic.
This could certainly be a better option to change the color of the outside instead of inside lines. (Unfortunately it would need to be re-done again with each update/iteration of parts.)