Filling Text for Engrave

Hello all,

Just received my Glowforge yesterday and I’m loving it.

I’m trying to engrave a name tag on some acrylic but I’m having issue getting text to come over properly for engraving. I’ve been searching for an answer but can’t seem to find one. My apologies if I’ve just missed it.

I’ve typed my text into Inkscape, converted it to a path and selected a fill. It still comes over into Glowforge as an outline. I feel like this is really simple and I’m just missing the point but I can’t seem to figure it out…

Thanks in advance for any help!

-Andy

Not sure what the problem is? You can engrave paths on the GF. They don’t need to be filled.

Maybe I should have hit the print button to try. When I look at the Glowforge app it appears as though it is just going to engrave an outline. I’d like it to engrave a fill as well. Is the preview misleading?

Any chance you could share a screenshot of the thing you are working on in inkscape and the glowforge user interface to see what settings you have it on?

When you upload a design, you have to select what you want it to do. Here’s a simple text path, when you select “cut”, it looks like this:

When you select engrave, it looks like this:

Each will process as directed.

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It appears I just jumped the gun in posting here. Thank you for your quick responses! I saw under the “Add Artwork” column that the text appeared to just be an outline so my brain told me it wouldn’t be filling it… I just ran a test print (which I should have just done to begin with) and I was just wrong. Thanks again for your time!!

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Hey thats what the forum is for. If you run into any more snags there are tons of posts about inkscape troubles and lots of other users that like to help.

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It’s a learning curve, and I learned something new today, too!
(I’ve usually been creating the text in PaintShop/PhotoShop and “import” into my SVG to combine, or just upload separately and arrange in the GFUI (depends if something just doing once, or will do more often where I spend the time).

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I’m guessing your artwork had both a fill and an outline. It defaults to using the outline, in that case, so interprets it as a cut. :slight_smile:

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Welcome to our gang :hugs:

Many folk try to set up the vectors by having either fill with no edge or edge with no fill but any can be either. You do want to make sure the colors of both are the same if you want them in the same layer in the GFUI or both different to make sure they are not. Often I will set a bunch of small parts to engrave to arrange them so I can make sure they can be close without overlapping and then kick it to cut before hitting go.

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I’m so sorry to hear that you hit this snag!

It looks like @eflyguy was able to provide some great instructions for allowing you to properly engrave the text you wanted to print. That’s great!

I’ll close this topic for now, but please don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly in the future at support@glowforge.com. We’d be happy to help!