You have any documentation or example file of this?
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I’ve made my own for fun. I’ll have to see if I can find it.
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Been thinking about a post-processor app to use specific colors or attributes to add the correct classes to paths, but have too much on my plate ATM. 
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To state the obvious then: The settings for an SVG could be stored in the SVG directly. And also read out of an SVG. And those stored values could be shown to the user to be modified if desired.
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They are, and they do in the GFUI.
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I just did a quick test, and this is manageable in the latest version of Illustrator using Graphic Styles. If you apply a Graphic Style to your vector, you can specify if is a “.cut” or “.engrave.vector”, and this gets exported as a class in the SVG that will work in the GFUI. I just did this quickly with a test file, so I didn’t figure out all of the details, but it seems to work. Since I am just learning Illustrator, I don’t know if older versions can support this or not.
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Aye, I was able to get that far, but having it define the other necessary data in the svg file for it to work with the GFUI is where it gets tricky. They have a lot going on in the backend that would probably need to be added via some post-processor, which also includes the order in which the steps are placed (cut 1, engrave 1, cut 2, score 1, engrave 2, etc ), among a number of other important pieces that need to be injected
So either a plugin will need to be written or some sort of post processor that also accounts for job ordering
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Possibly. I didn’t dig into it in detail and try to specify order. But, even being able to mark vectors for engrave or cut in Illustrator seems like a huge benefit.
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The problem with any attempt to do this is that 
HQ can change things at any time. What may work one day might not the next. Then it becomes a game of cat and mouse, and that’s frustrating and nobody wins.
Maybe someday things will be stable enough that can let the community write the plug-ins and post-processors so they don’t have to…
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This is true of any software, so I’ll take whatever I can at the moment to make my life easier.
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I’d love to see an example. I’d like to write a post-processor for my own files, e.g., to change blue lines into scores. (I’d probably just write a dumb unfriendly Perl script to do it at first, but perhaps I might write a proper macOS GUI at some point. No promises.)
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I wasnt able to reproduce this using those classes. The GFUI recognizes whether something is a cut or engrave, but that is based on the stroke or fill for each. ‘cut’ or ‘engrave’ or ‘engrave.vector’ as class names applied to elements did nothing for me by themselves.
were you able to get something to auto-load as a score?
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In HTML CSS class names (which SVG CSS is derived from), the period at the beginning is significant.
Try adding the leading period to your class names?
I’ve asked for more documentation on that in a separate post…we’ll see if they respond.
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I was going to suggest the same thing. To test what I was doing, I took the same path and duplicated it in two separate layers (and two separate colors), then applied a different class to each one to make sure that they appeared differently in the GFUI.
Take a single closed path and duplicating it, I assigned one a Graphic Style of ‘.cut’ and one a Graphic Style of ‘.engrave.vector’ and each of them appeared differently in the GFUI.
I think I also figured out how they are defining the order of operations, but I am not sure that can be easily managed in Illustrator using the Graphic Styles. I’ll have to do more testing later tonight or tomorrow.
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It seems that Grunt Task is used by quite a few people for stuff like this (I know nothing about it):
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I did some further testing this evening, but I am getting inconsistent results. So it’s likely that I made some inaccurate assumptions with how the GFUI interprets the SVG. I’ll try to do some more testing tomorrow.
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Reading this tutorial might help with understanding what the GFUI is seeing when it imports an SVG: 
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I don’t think that is relevant here. We are trying to work out what SVG annotation is used in the catalogue files that allow them to specify score instead of cut and also order the operations. It seems to be style information referenced by class names.
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Gotcha. 
To generalize the discussion slightly, I’d love to be able to set bitmaps up to which engrave to use (graphic, deep graphic, 3d carve) as well. If all of that can be in Illustrator (or other SVG editor) then it’d really shorten the workflow in GFUI. Hopefully it’s just more Graphic Styles.
This reminds me - didn’t Dan talk about making a Glowforge plugin or style guide for Illustrator to allow designers to do things like this? I love the idea of a feature he talked about - drawing slots such that the width of the slot would be parametric and size to the thickness of the material you were cutting. Yeah, not an absolute requirement, but wouldn’t it be nice to not have to fiddle all the slots by hand when changing materials? (if using a non-parametric tool, or working from a ‘flat’ file instead of a CAD file).
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