Discussion of February 2025 Update

[chris1]

@roy

It really looks like the Glowforge app is looking at the comment and treating the SVG differently if it thinks it was generated by Adobe Illustrator.

That’s correct. A lot of this was puzzled out on the early days of the forum when we spent a lot of time dissecting different files to try to understand the behavior. There are several heuristics Glowforge uses to try to work around the lack of units in these files, including scaling to a 20"x12" artboard or looking at the comments to determine the software that created it.

@chris1

llustrator, in “Save As… SVG” mode, uses “px” as the units, where 1 px = 1/72 in. This is only Illustrator’s opinion, not enshrined in any specification, and is therefore subject to interpretation. The only reason this works is that the Glowforge software sees the comment that says “Illustrator made this” and knows about this assumption, so it interprets the file accordingly. But as we see in this thread, trying to bring it into different software that has different interpretation of what a “px” is can be problematic.

I much prefer the cleaner SVG produced by Illustrator’s “Export”, which appears to be a completely independent implementation from Save As. It produces (as long as you uncheck “Responsive”) real-world units like “in”, which can’t be misinterpreted.

That said, your file did give me a clue as to what I think the problem is. In order to export with physical units, you need to have your document set to physical units (e.g. Inches or Millimeters). I suspect yours is not.

If that is set to pixels, it renders the responsive checkbox meaningless, and would also affect copy and paste.

I did a video a while back (good lord, 7 years ago?) on setting up Illustrator. I really need re-do that with a modern version and the stuff I’ve learned since.