Center on Material

Not entirely sure where else to put this.

The problem I have is that I need to engrave on the center of the material. I have it masked and I can surely draw an X across the material to indicate where center is. But what would be nice is a way to set a point and mark that point as center of material and then to be able to click a button and get my design to center to that dot.

Right now I am stuck selecting my engraving moving it roughly over the X and then use a sheet of paper with my monitor and the side and top center points to get it centered. It just feels so wrong to use a straight edge with my monitor.

Although I mention a centering dot, it really could be anything. Guidelines would work too!

Am I missing something?

UPDATE

With the feature for aligning to objects having rolled out, that fixes my problem. I draw a small circle, ‘target’ it onto the X that I have drawn on the object and then center my engravings to that. I then ignore or delete the circle.

If you create your work on a 12x20 artboard, and place the art dead center you can then upload it, click on it and click on the ruler icon (bottom left) and enter the center point as 6x10 and it will be dead center.

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The problem is that most of what I am putting on a glowforge is not 12x20. Even some of the proof grade material, like the hardwood, is not that size. I could create a centering jig but I would need to do that for each item that gets put onto the glowforge. It would just be more convenient if there was a dot, like the centering handles that are on the edge which I currently us ea straight edge with my monitor to center off of.

The center of the work area will not be 6-20 in any case as 0,0 is about 1,1 away from that corner. You can however measure off the right bottom corner placing the material and subtract that number from 19, 11 and be close to where you want to be.

If you then use the Set Focus and after that align your work, it should be very accurate,

So, support will pass this upwards as a customer request. But that’s unlikely to solve your immediate problem.

Something like this might help:

https://community.glowforge.com/t/reinsertable-grid-file-and-tutorial/93366?u=jbmanning5

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That is effectively what I do now but it is finding out what the center point of my drawing and aligning it to the center point of my material. I currently use the centered edge circles with a straight edge on my monitor. Just seems wrong to use a ruler or straight edge with my monitor.

It also seems like it would be a huge improvement if I could drop a point a point on my bed and say this is the center of my material. Then Highlight my design as a whole and say snap centers together.

That is what the whole precision placement is all about.
then there is…

or

@SmittyBuilds @jbmanning5 is correct, It’s a great idea for a feature -but we haven’t announced anything like that yet. I’m going to send it to our product team with a note that it came from a customer request.

Thanks to everyone for the help and advice! I’m going to leave this post open for a while to allow the conversation to continue.

There is now a post on how to grid the base :slight_smile:

https://community.glowforge.com/t/grid-on-the-base-of-your-glowforge

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