Creating an outline of a logo to cut it out

[EverseenCreative]

Hey Community!

I am trying to may a key cutout for a Realtor. I have the logo that I am trying to cut out and glue on top of the key that I have made. I can’t get the glowforge app to create cut lines for the insides of the “bow tie” part of the logo.

I also tried to take the PNG logo file into Inkscape and convert to path but I can’t get it to do that either. Any tips or tricks to get this to cute out the lines? I have attached screenshot of current work as well as the PNG logo file for anyone who has any ideas!

THANK YOU!

[EverseenCreative]

Oh and also to cut out the “house windows”

[evansd2]

What you’re looking for is “trace bitmap”. That’ll convert the shape to paths suitable for cutting or engraving.

You’ll need to handle making an outline. Sounds like you can handle that part, yeah?

I re-read your post, I don’t think you’re trying to make an outline, just to cut the parts out. Trace bitmap is your ticket.

[EverseenCreative]

Trace bitmap worked. Thank you!!

[evansd2]

So I came back to this, and decided to try it. I traced and noticed the usual issues with traces: inaccuracy and inefficiency.

I traced it:

And then I inspected the resulting path. It was full of way too many nodes.

That won’t do, so I think ok I’ll do path->simplify.

Nope. That’s a monstrosity. Look at all the weirdness. So I undo that and think to myself “I’ll manually remove the extra nodes.” It’s painful but the easiest thing here.

Nope. I quickly realized that the problems are deeper than just too many nodes, there’s all kinds of inaccuracy. There are lots of problems, but look at this corner, for example. In the next picture look closely at the upper left corner and you can see it’s not a vertical line, it’s peeled away to the right:

“Big deal, that’s not bad”… and that may be true, depends on what you’re doing. If you plan to ever use this to do anything high precision like inlay or something large scale like a wall sign, it’ll become a problem.

So… the only solution was to manually redraw the entire thing by simply using the pen tool and drawing it carefully. This process is tedious so I won’t bother to document it, I’ll just post the final result:

And the resulting SVG:

Right click to download.

Anyway, you didn’t ask, and the traced version may have been perfect for your needs… but if you want a truly perfect and clean SVG, here you go. I did this largely as an exercise to keep my skills sharp, you know?

[jamesdhatch]

@evansd2

And the resulting SVG:

Wow! That’s going above & beyond in the support of answering a question and providing guidance. Really good of you to do that.