Can someone post a tutorial where I can cut an object out and engrave or score the same object. In Affinity designer. I know you can pull it into glowforge and manually set it but then you have to manually set it. Was hoping to preset that in Affinity designer. Thanks!
If the object has a fill, it will default to engrave with Proofgrade settings.
If the object has a stroke (no fill), it will default to a cut.
Nothing will default to a score.
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ok thanks let me see if I its on fill but do you attach it to the object so when it gets transferred to glowforge I don’t have to manually place it.
Another trick is to use colors to set the order of operations.
The GF UI will order them according to RGB hex value.
So Black (#000000) will be first, pure blue (#0000FF) will be next, etc.
So if you make your final cut operation red (#FF0000) it will be after those other colors. It makes it easy to select the right operation when you have, say, a scored outline the same shape as the final cut.
You can download a palette here for Inkscape. I’m sure you can do the same for AD.
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I’m unsure what your question means - but hopefully this clears it up.
If you upload this:
The first one will cut everything - in seemingly random order (actually based on which was created first)
The second one will cut everything - the black 1st, the red 2nd
The third will engrave the square 1st and cut the circle 2nd
The last will engrave everything except the square, and then cut out the circle (this is done using Boolean commands - exclusion is what it’s called in Inkscape)
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The GFUI separates the artwork in to pieces based on color (also, it’ll group objects of the same color based on some rule I have yet to figure out after almost 3 years of ownership 
).
So for every different operation you want to perform with the pieces of your artwork, assign it a color that’s not already being used by some other piece. I make the things I want to cut, red. I make the things I want to score, black. I make the things I want to engrave, yellow. Then when they load in to GFUI, they’ll all appear as separate tiles on the left side of the GFUI. Select the tile, pick the operation you want to perform for that color.
Note that an object in the artwork does not have to be filled in the program you use to generate it in order to engrave. And filled objects do not have to be engraved. GFUI makes guesses about what you intend to do with filled vs. not-filled objects but you can override these defaults the same way as discussed above, by just selecting that piece of artwork from the tiles on the left and telling GFUI what it is you want it to do instead of what it chose. It’s easy to understand what you’ll get from the print if you fill the things you want engraved and only outline the things you want to cut and score, but you don’t have to follow that rule.
The ignore choice is also useful. When I engrave something like a piece of slate or my niece’s MacBook, I make a jig. I create a box that’s the size of the object I’m going to engrave, and then I place the artwork relative to that box. I tape a sheet of cardboard to the crumb tray. Then in GFUI I tell it to ignore all the artwork except for the outer enclosing box and I cut just that box. Then I remove the cutout and place the actual object in the opening. Go back in to GFUI and set the box to ignore and all the rest of the artwork to whatever it needs to be (engrave/cut/score) and run the job and be 100% confident that the artwork will end up exactly where I want it to be. Do not rely on the camera for precise alignment, it has generally not proven to be up to the task…
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I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, but here’s some good design tutorial links.
And this wonderful resource (I think this might be the most pertinent to your question.)
This is a cool discussion about custom GF color palates that you can add to your graphics program. It’s not really necessary, but since others have mentioned how colors operate in the GUI, I thought I’d share it.
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