Ctrl A

Someone please put me out of my misery. I love playing with my glowforge everyday but there is something that is being a major pain. I bring a file into glowforge it renders it and the little box will appear around it when I do ctrl a, ok the problem comes when I try repeatedly to move that box in any way shape or form, it just keeps disappearing. I know how to drag and turn items but this is being a major headache. Only when I am about to loose my temper will it finally work right. My app has a little devil in it. Tell it to go away because it is making my work alot harder than it should be.

They like to keep us on our toes. :smile:

There’s a trick to it that I haven’t completely mastered yet, but the easy way around it is to just use the arrow keys on the keyboard. Holding down the SHIFT key while pressing the up/down/left/right keys jumps it around in pretty big bites, without the SHIFT key it just nudges things along. The nudges are smaller the more you zoom in, so you can get some very tiny adjustments in placing.

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I use the arrow keys to go up and down but when I want to resize it or turn it on its side it just won’t let me for the longest.

Turning it on it’s side is fairly easy, you drag on the lollipop handle above the shape. If you want to rotate it through fixed angles, press & hold the SHIFT key first, then drag the handle.

Resizing…yeah.

Just takes practice…it does get easier. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Don’t grab the box, grab one of the art objects in the box.
When you are rotating it, sometimes the rotation handle disappears. Just try again. Make sure that if you want to snap the rotation to 90 or 180 that you press and hold CTRL before clicking on the rotation handle.
I tend to use the arrow keys a lot also.

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Or the Shift key to constrain it to 45 degree increments.

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On a small object it can be really hard if not impossible to grab that rotation handle—it just keeps disappearing. I’ve found that zooming in to the object does help.

Thank you all I see what I haven’t been doing.

Ok what do you do when the file is to big and you want to make it smaller on the page after it is highlighted?

Open it in your design application and make any changes there. Then you know you’re getting your sizing exactly correct for your project.

Design application? I am opening svg files on to the glowforge app and trying to resize them there. Is that not what we are supposed to do?

No reason not to do it in the glowforge app. Though you don’t have good control. Not very precise.

You absolutely can do that. The downside to doing that is that you have no fine control over changes. Whereas in your design app you can say “I want this to be 12.36mm x 11.71mm.” Heck, in the Glowforge app you can’t even say “I want this to be 12mm x 11mm.” Sure, you can get pretty close eyeballing it against the rulers, but… You can’t say that in the Glowforge app because it’s not at all a design app. So the best way to make those changes are in your design app, then once you’re ready to cut, you bring it into the Glowforge app.

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When you are talking about a design app are you talking about inkscape or something like that? Or do we have a design app here that I have no idea how to get to?

The first. Third party applications.

Okay, thank you.

Thanks for the help everyone. I’m going to close this thread - if you have any additional questions, go ahead and post a new topic.