Etch lines in design and cut

We are trying to simply etch lines on wood (not cut through) and also cut out the design in which we’ve etched lines on. Like on the image below. I’m making wooden earrings and I want to cut out the shape but have the lines etched. Please help!

image

Welcome to the forum! There are a bunch of folks here happy to help. Staff will eventually respond (usually 3 business days) but hopefully we can get you sorted before then.

When you upload a piece of art into the Glowforge User Interface (GFUI) each step appears in a column on the left. When you click on a step it will offer you the option to Engrave, Cut, Score or Ignore (presuming your art is a vector). If it’s a raster it will only offer you Engrave or Ignore.

It sounds like you want to set part of your art to either Score (narrow shallow line) or Engrave (very shallow line of whatever thickness) and your exterior lines to Cut.

If everything is showing up as a single task on the left then you’ll want to use a piece of graphics software (Inkscape, PaintNet, etc.) to change the colours of one set of lines because the GFUI translates different colours into different steps.

If that doesn’t work post your art up here and we can direct you more specifically :slight_smile:

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Omg thank you so much for the quick response. We have a piece of wood that we are making wooden earrings out of. We have the shape that we want cut out and that works perfectly. We just want to engrave lines into the earring. Just like the lines shown here
IMG_1841.jpg

Yeah, adding the lines for scoring/engraving is definitely something that needs to be done in a graphics program. Take the shape you have, open it up in Inkscape (or equivalent), add the lines in a different colour, then save as .svg and upload to the GFUI and you’ll have two different commands on the left.

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A distinction also needs to be made between a filled object which is the sign to be engraved (it has no defined stroke outline) and a single line/path/stroke in the design program that will get processed as a vector line and can be a score or a cut.

To engrave a series of straight lines, you have to have them as filled. Here is an example that might help. The blue one on the left has green strokes that can be set as a score. The red one on the right has purple stripes that will default to engrave.

Earings

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Welcome
You have gotten some excellent help on this project. I think you will find lots of information and tutorials here that you will need for your projects going forward. Getting started

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Thank you!!!

Thanks for the information and direction @marmak3261, @deirdrebeth and @dklgood! The link provided is a great resource for getting oriented with your Glowforge app interface. If you run into any other trouble, please start a new topic, or email us at support@glowforge.com. We’re here to help!