What a lot of folks were doing was just setting up ruler guides at roughly the place on thier 12 x 20 artboards that were āOut of Boundsā You can get fairly close. Then keep your design inside those guides, and it shows up the same way on the screen in the GFUI.
The guides do not get pulled over into the GFUI. But the disadvantage is you have to set them every timeā¦no way to save guides. (I donāt think there isā¦I was wanting to see if I could write an action for it, but I always get busy on other things.)
If youāre using Adobe Illustrator, you may find that you donāt need to make the artboard any particular size to have things load in the same place you put them. For example, here is a 1"x8" artboard, in which Iāve placed a 0.5" diameter circle at exactly 0.75" across and 2.5" down. Despite it being a bizarre shape nowhere near 20x12, it still loads exactly where I placed it.
This whole 20x12* thing is a bit over played. I used to make more of an effort to explain it, but I got in a bit of trouble for that, so I wonāt go into the details. Suffice it to say, itās solving a problem that Illustrator doesnāt have.
* I think most people use the width x height convention when talking about dimensions.
It appears that objects in the app use the upper-left corner as the origin, so I guess your artboard only needs to be as big as your object plus whatever space is needed to get it into position.
But you may want to avoid other sizes that have the same aspect ratio in a dimensionless svg (10x6 for example) since apparently GFUI will guess it was really 20x12. I think thatās where the recommendation for 20x12 comes from.
Yes, dimensionless svgās can also be avoided, but thatās also not the currently recommended method.
I find that in Inkscape, I just do whatever Iām going to send to glowforge, then as a last step, I simply select all and set the x and y to be 0,0. This places it properly in the UI so I can find it. I almost always manually move the entire cut/engrave to fit my material, Iām stingy with it and want to put it where I wonāt waste too much space.
The whole āplace each object exactly in the SVGā thing is kind of pointless since we canāt place the material in a reliable position, nor does that even matter when youāre using scraps, which is about 80% of the time for me.
When I have a ton of parts and do need everything to fit exactly in one engravable area, I start by either setting up the page size or just drawing a 11x17" rectangle and then arrange my parts in Inkscape. The UI isnāt the best for rearranging 200+ pieces, so I find it much easier to do it at this stage.
Then as a last thing, i select all and move it to 0,0, and Iām off.
If you can save a top-down image in a grayscale heightmap format that goes from black to white mapped to height, you can engrave it nicely. Basswood has had good results, here:
Iāve just been diving into Illustrator, and that More Options button was hiding that it was only saving to 1 decimal point. I was getting frustrated with a design not printing, but I made it 3 like you have in your screen shot @Jules, and I feel like Iāve unlocked a whole new level (like 100 times maybe?) of awesome in my forge Thanks so much for what you do!!!
On the Mac, running Inkscape under XQuartz, I was able to use the following procedure to change the default page size:
Bring up the Applications folder in Finder
Right-click on Inkscape
Select āShow Package Contentsā
Open Contents/Resources/Share/Inkscape/Templates/default.svg
Make changes in File->Document Propertiesā¦
Save file
In Windows, I was able to change the default page size by opening
C:\Program Files\Inkscape\share\templates\default.svg
and going to the File->Document Propertiesā¦ dialog.
Chuckle! It creeps up on you over about a year of testing. I got a jump on things with the PRU, and just wrote it down as I went. (It doesnāt take long.)
So glad you wrote it down. It is very much appreciate what you and all the others do for this community. Itās a bit difficult when time is limited to learn all you need to know.
I am trying to learn as quickly as possible as I am trying to get our Makerspace (with a 501c3 educational outreach for the community) back up and revitalized. The money we earn is going to the fund to try to get a physical space again and that is going to take quite a bit of money (aka sold items) to have enough to float us until we can grow the group again.
I am working with Illustrator for the first time (I know Photoshop pretty well) and hoping once I show the few members we have that this is doable, that they will jump on board with ideas or assistance to get this in gear! so all this assistance/tips/sharing of ideas is so appreciated!
ROFL! Oh, no problemā¦Iām pretty sure the offer to document was what got me into the PRU program in the first place. (By that point they had probably figured out that I can be a bit āwordyā.)
I donāt know if you are aware of the Matrixā¦if you are just getting into learning Illustrator, there are two of them that you need to check outā¦lots of really good information in here:
I had one but not the other. There is SO much to learn there and so appreciated. I try to find something as I go along, I should have started way before I got the GF but I didnāt know I would stumble into a FREE version of Illustrator 3 until it happenedā¦so now I am learning on it.
Hmmm if anyone else just happens to have the CS3 version of one of the Adobe programs but doesnāt have the whole suite (I only had the Photoshop program), let me know and Iāll tell you how I got the whole suite this year.
Thanks so much for what you do!!!
Seems like SO MUCH to learn. These tips really help out someone new to this.
