See version 2 below for software.
Hi everyone,
If you’ve ever cut a design with nested shapes — like a circle inside a rectangle inside a larger outline — you’ve probably discovered the hard way that Glowforge doesn’t cut in the order your design file specifies. Instead, it groups everything by color and optimizes for speed, bouncing around the design however it sees fit. That’s usually fine, until the laser cuts an outer shape first, the material shifts, and all your inner cuts are now off.
The standard workaround is to manually assign slightly different colors to each shape in your design software so they show up as separate operations in the Glowforge sidebar. Then you drag them into the right order. It works, but it’s tedious — especially since you have to re-enter the same cut settings (speed, power, passes) for every single color group.
I built CutOptimizer to automate this.
What it does:
You give it your DXF or SVG file. It figures out which shapes are inside which, then outputs a new SVG where every nesting level gets its own slightly different color — close enough that they all look the same, but different enough that Glowforge treats them as separate operations in the right order:
- Open paths first (score lines, engraving paths — things that won’t cause material to shift)
- Innermost closed shapes next
- Outermost shapes last
You still have to apply the same cut settings to each color group in Glowforge, but at least the order is correct without any manual rearranging.
How to use it:
- Download the ZIP file, unzip it, and open it in your browser — no install, no account, nothing to set up
- Drop in your .dxf or .svg file
- Click Process
- Download the optimized SVG and upload to Glowforge
Everything runs locally in your browser. No data is uploaded anywhere.
Looking for feedback:
I’ve been testing primarily with SolidWorks DXF files. I’d love to hear how it handles files from other tools:
-
Illustrator, Inkscape, or other SVG sources — Does your file load correctly? Do the shapes look right? SVG parsing is the newest part and most likely to have issues with complex paths or grouped objects.
-
Cut order accuracy — After uploading the processed SVG to Glowforge, does the sidebar order actually go inside-out? A screenshot of what you see would be really helpful if something looks off.
-
Curve quality — If arcs or splines look chunky or distorted in the output compared to your original, I’d like to know.
If you run into problems, sharing the original file (or a simplified version that shows the issue) along with what you expected vs. what happened makes it much easier to track down.
The tool is free. Happy to keep improving it based on what people need.