I am trying to make some tokens. A thin border around the token and the text inside NOT engraved (Raised) and the other parts engraved. I use Coreldraw.
I make a circle and fill it with a color and unstroke it.
I made some text and punched that text out of the circle.
All looks good. Nothing is stroked. I have a blue circle with white letters inside.
When I bring it into the GFUI. on the left side, the circle is solid with the outline of my text and the image I can drag around is a solid circle and will engrave as a solid circle. (If I chose score - I can now see the letters.)
How do I actually get the letters to show up? What am I missing?
Hello. If you’d like some help from your fellow GF users you might consider posting your output file (SVG, PDF) or, and it will be a smaller group but you’ll still get help, your original Coreldraw file.
If you’d rather not do that there are several items in the Glowforge Tips and Tricks section that talk about preparing files for the GF. I’m pretty sure Coreldraw is one of the software packages covered. Check the “matrix” to find specific articles.
Yeah, @hansepe is correct - there are certain ways to design your projects for the machine if you want it to interpret the results the way you intend them to be.
I’d suggest reading through a few short tutorials, starting with these:
Then when you get ready to use the subtraction tool in CorelDraw to remove the white letters, you’ll understand how the GFUI will interpret it.
TLDR:
You can just rasterize the results of your vector design and the GFUI will engrave it. You will not have the option to do anything else like score it though. Rasters are always engraved and white is ignored in rasters.
As @Jules noted, you could rasterize the “ball” to make sure it engraves.
Looking at the SVG it looks like you have 2 fills (for the / and the background ball) which would give you the problem. I subtracted the / from the background and got this.
Check your colors. When you load this version into the GFUI you should have 3 groups, the top should be your engrave, the next one down needs to be set to score, and the final is the cut layer. Check to colors to make sure I didn’t mess them up!
@Jules Thanks for the replies! I have read all of those tutorials you made which were very handy and I just read them again! And I followed them to make this - making a compound path front minus back - like your star example.
@hansepe Im not sure where the 2 fills are - As I look at my original SVG - there is nothing else but the ball…but whatever you did solved it. How did you see a second fill?
There were 4 layers - interior cuts, exterior cuts, a score and the engrave.
Bummer…I was hoping that wasn’t the case…unfortunately, there is a known issue with CorelDraw SVG files that pertains to winding rules - sometimes it leaves behind the white fill that has been subtracted out. (At least as far as AI and the Glowforge interface is concerned.)
You need to hear from one of the regular CorelDraw users to give their favorite workarounds for it… like @kittski or @jamesdhatch if they see this. (I believe some of them are saving the files as PDF for the moment instead of SVG. The GFUI interprets those correctly from CorelDraw.)
Or again, rasterizing it would work if you are engraving. Sorry, I’m not that familiar with CD, so can’t help much on this one.
Weird. All I did was copied your graphic to my predefined GF start file, I lost the colors so I had to redo them, but I took your compound path, released it, and then recreated it.
I’m working in Adobe Illustrator CC, so definitely not Coreldraw.
Quite a price jump and if you’re happy with Coreldraw there is no need to change. You use what you’re comfy using.
I’ve been using Adobe since way too long ago and I’m happy with it. I’ve got several other packages that would work but I’m staying with AI until the day comes I can’t afford it anymore
Used Corel 2017 but X5 would work the same for this project…
Took the dark ball that gave you problems and culled it from the rest.
It showed as a large roundish engrave in bOb.
Broke the curves apart. Selected the letters and white filled//outlined and ordered to front.
Used (Shaping – Back Minus Front). Then made a grayscale bitmap. This is the upper one.
Then just because I could, I also made an (outline trace → High Quality) on the bitmap. This was pulled down as the lower image.
As you can see, they will both work, it just depends on if you wish to 3D engrave, since top one is a bitmap and lower one is curves.
ZIP file below. Hope this sorts it for you…
extra note: that stretch image weirdness shown occurs with some svg files. Quick fix for Corel is to load into inkscape, then save anew as regular svg (not inkscape svg). Easy to fix so never investigated it further.
@Miri I’m glad to see you’ve got your project back on track. I’m going to close this thread - if the problem reoccurs, go ahead and post a new topic.
