Engraves and Scores go off path when copied and pasted in UI

I’m making a double sided token that has a lot of steps. I also want to print a bunch per sheet, but only deal with establishing the UI settings once and then copying and pasting the token across the sheet. As you will see, the Glowforge handles one token just fine. Once I copy and paste them, it starts moving some of the engraves and scores off path.

Everything in the file is aligned properly. It is exported from Illustrator as an SVG following the proper Illustrator to SVG parameters:

Everything in the Glowforge UI seems aligned, but you can see on the left that the gradient engrave orders are blank. The UI seems to really struggle to load this job:

The results are all over the place:

When running just a single token, it turns out perfectly:

Thanks in advance for any help and insight you all may have!

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I would do the copying and pasting in your design program BEFORE importing. That allows you to combine engraves into one big engrave, too, which will make it faster. That’s how I did my tiger party favors. All the front side engraves were one object, and all the back side engraves were another.

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(Not to say this isn’t an issue in the GFUI that needs addressing – I think it does!)

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My concern in that is the amount of layers that would show up in the GFUI. It would be an impossible number of jobs to delegate and differentiate. But I think you’re saying to somehow combine all of the similar layers within illustrator as a single layer before export As SVG. I’m not sure how to do that, but I’m sure I’ll find something online.

Or will simply cutting and pasting work and the colors will be interpreted in the GFUI as one job?

The GFUI differentiates by color and type of operation. My tiger job had 5 steps even though it cut 32 pieces – placement markers, tiger face engraves, Kanji engraves, keychain hole cuts, and outline cuts. (The last two could have been a single operation if I’d made the outlines the same color.)

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For the engrave portion, select them all and turn them into a raster (within the program), then the rest are matched by using the identical colour (literally 1 point off will mean a separate step)

I know when cutting/scoring a single line it’ll run down the center of the line you’ve defined - and your defined lines are thick, but that it works correctly in the single token would belie that so…

Really not sure - this may require a look-see at the back end. Can you upload your art here? We can see if someone else has the same issue (which points to art) or if it’s fine on their end that points to a machine issue.

If not, once you get contacted by a staff person you can send them the art via email.

Odd possibility, just because I recently ran into it. When you save to SVG, take a look at the dialog options and make sure the box for “Responsive” is not checked. It seems the GFUI can have its way with paths saved with responsive attributes.

There are other posts here mentioning oddness with Illustrator “Export to SVG” (vs. “Save as…”).

:+1:

Great tip

Happy to! But someone having the same issue could be a GFUI issue still.
I haven’t been contacted by staff yet, unfortunately.
Rock for GF friends

You are absolutely right. That was a typo on my end. I have lurked extensively on these boards and have always used ‘save as’ and have followed the proper protocols for SVG saving in Illustrator, so I’m certain it’s not that.

Apparently the ‘upload’ option in this didn’t upload the file as a downloadable link. If someone can tell me how to do that I’d be happy to provide it.
Rock for GF friends

It’s there as an SVG, both times. Posting as SVG removed the raster (gradient) engraves, however. Compress the file first, then upload the resulting .ZIP. Or export as PDF.

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Interesting.
First take - 4 tiered gradient.pdf (545.7 KB)
Above is the first take of the file as a PDF.
To get the effect I wanted, I did 4 different gradient shapes on the shading of the rock.
I’ve been playing around with gradient options and have this one that I’m going to try when I get home as well, that has only one gradient block. I did not rasterize the gradient on this one before exporting as a PDF for any of you.
Second take - full gradient.pdf (399.3 KB)

I’ll also do a test tonight on the original file to see if just one copy and paste iteration creates havoc. In thinking more about this, it’s fascinating that even the original file upload placement went astray on the prints, as well as all the pasted ones.

I honestly can’t understand what you are trying to accomplish with all of those design pieces. It looks like the main design inside the rectangle is all engraved? If so, a single bitmap/raster of the whole thing (then with copies repeated in a single image) would be foolproof and drastically simpler.

I appreciate the attempt at a workaround, but I created this topic to address a strange issue.
My design choice was to do scores and engraves.

Back to the topic: I created a file with just one gradient per side, instead of 4 and exported the gradient as a PNG which I brought back in, instead of just rasterizing each of them inside of Illustrator (which I had done before). I brought it into the GFUI and copied and pasted it within the UI, but only 4 times. The results were perfect:

So the issue may be an incompatibility of the number of tasks and copying and pasting in the UI? I can’t say for sure. I will be running a sheet of 100 or so of these in the near future and will report back on whether or not more copy and paste orders cause a problem.

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Testing to see if uploading the new and working SVG with the PNG gradients makes them disappear here in the forum:
AS Full Grad rastered

It does.

The forum software removes all embedded bitmaps from SVG files by design.

The UI has never supported shaded fill vectors. How your initial results worked at all, I have no idea, but I suspect the response would simply be that it is not supported, and shaded engraves have to be converted to raster.

PNG is raster.

… which is why they were removed from the SVG.