I lay them out in the app before I print them because I’m often working remotely (away from my printer). I get everything that way I want it in terms of sizing and placement and when I click the GF logo to go back to the main design screen I see my design… yet when I open my design, the extra layers or items I uploaded are GONE! Basically nothing saved.
Is there no save button? Am I missing something? I’m concerned about the app / GFUI being a cloud application that does not autosave… if it does, what is the interval? Can I manually save once I move something?
Saving settings is not implemented as of yet…so get in the habit of taking good notes for each project, or better yet design the additional features into the finished project using an external vector drawing program.
So when I create a design, and move everything around manually (eyeballing) / resize manually (because there are no actual settings to edit numerically) … my design may or may not save?
It would seem GF server resources could be cut in a fraction and save them money, while speeding everything up because a certain percentage of their traffic is just people redoing designs that should have saved (?)
Does Chrome work better than Firefox? Mac better than PC?
So basically the GFUI / app is a VERY limited UI for minor adjustments that may or may not save… but for reliability and control you want to do all design outside of the app. It should be viewed as basically a print terminal?
I would prefer to go design in my own programs in the first place, but here is why I did it in the app in the first place:
However, there is a lot of subtlety and details to saving “designs” that make it a hard problem.
First, saved designs are quite unlikely to be “load and print”. At the least, the material may be in a different position and a different size. You’re gonna have to re-arrange and possibly scale things.
Secondly, if you move at all beyond the proof grade settings, then you’re going to need to adjust everything anyway. Even when moving between different batches of the same wood, I’m finding that I have to fine tune because of minor differences in thickness or material (example; some basswood takes an engraving perfectly at 1000 / 80… same label of material that is from a different batch really wants the power cranked to 90 to get the same effect).
So, totally agree. Saving would be a huge boon. But it isn’t quite the “just press print” solution that we all dream of.
Also; in thinking about this quite a bit, I’m not sure saving in the GFUI is really what is most desirable. I’m thinking I’d benefit more from being able to mark up the SVG design files with metadata that hints or drives the configuration upon import into the GFUI.
This is what I would like. I was thinking I could write a program that takes a configuration file that specifies a mapping of stroke color to specific settings. Then I could just use the appropriate colors in my vector editing program, and when ready to print run my program to generate an annotated SVG file that the GFUI would consume.
If you read the SVG spec, you’ll see they even envisioned these third-party annotations and made allowances for them in the format.
It doesn’t yet. We have to reset score settings and cut settings, etc. between operations. Write them down if you want to remember them, or you can just refer to a spreadsheet for your values. (My preferred method…I just leave it open next to the interface.)
Wait a moment… everyone has to reset the engrave, cut, score settings every time they close the preview screen?
For example, you set up the settings on a Tuesday, make a print… Wednesday comes around, you open the artwork in GFApp and have to tell everything what to cut/score/engrave again?
How many kb of data does it require to save that? It would save everyone a LOT of time! Wow.
I was hoping to upload my artwork and save all of that so when I get back to my studio I can just worry about printing - not working in software…
I might have misunderstood what you were asking about - if you close the Preview screen, it saves any opened settings. If you have set something to Ignore though, those tend to revert and have to be re-entered when you decide you want to process something.
And if you close the print, they all revert. Currently.
Yep. It does not currently save any changes you make, so it’ll be back to exactly how it was when you imported your SVG/PDF/whatever.
Not much at all. Storage space is almost certainly not an issue at all. Even writing the code to save changes is probably not all that difficult. The difficult part comes in designing a good user interface and sensible behaviors that handle can everyone’s needs, e.g., autosave is probably a must for a web app in today’s world, but what if a year later someone wants to go back to an earlier version. How many different autosaved versions do you keep, and how do you let the user navigate between them?
This kind of thing gets difficult fast once you start looking at the details of how it actually works in practice. I’m hoping GF takes the time to get it right. (But at the same time I am hoping they get something working reasonably soon, of course.)
