Glowforge Pro keeps changing my dash cut lines to solid lines? Anyone got a fix?

[simpleservant01]

Can i set up a file to cut with dashed lines and not have it turned to solid lines when it adds my file to print?

[ekla]

What program are you making your dashed lines in?

In Illustrator and Inkscape the basic dash is just a line style (an appearance effect) and the underlying line is still a solid line. They have to be converted in to true dashes before sending to GF.

[simpleservant01]

Inkscape. I was reading you have to convert it to a broken path but i haven’t found a way to do that yet?

[ekla]

I’m an AI user but I’ve seen this discussed for Inkscape here:

Inkscape - Dashes

Hello. I’m having problems with a circle outline that I want dashed in Inkscape where I used two circles and the “Exclude” in the paths tab to leave just the “Stroke,” I’ve tried turning the “Fill” off and leaving just the “Stroke,” and I’ve tried keeping the “Fill” and the “Stroke” but turning the opacity to zero, but nothing seems to work when I bring it into the GF UI. I keep getting the popup that says there’s dashes that it turned into lines. I’ve actually done this before on my very fir…

[beerfaced]

I believe this is how it works:

Select your dashed oval, and go to…
Extensions/ modify path/ convert to dashes

[simpleservant01]

ok ill try that and get back to you…TY for the info

[evansd2]

@simpleservant01

TY for the info

Yeah that was the solution that I wrote back in 2019 in the thread that Ekla pointed you to, I don’t believe it has changed since then.

You can go even deeper down this rabbit hole with custom dash patterns and using stroke to path and whatnot.

Some advanced dash shenanigans can be found here:

Inkscape - Creating a Circular Dashed Line for Perforations

Well, kind of, right? They are a bit lumpy. I would suggest using the line to dashes approach with rounded line ends, then stroke to path. Follow @dan_berry’s great advice to make your dashes into line segments. Then change the line ends to be rounded… [Screenshot (507)] Now do Path->stroke to path. You’ll end up with “ovals”. (not true ovals, but close enough for this discussion) [Screenshot (508)] That’s pretty good. I personally like oval stitch holes, but you said you wanted circl…

That’s the best part about this forum, there’s so much that has already been written up, you can search for almost anything without having to wait for anyone to reply to a new thread.

[o-o]

Here’s a simple tip.

There is no such thing as a “line” in SVG land. There are strokes and paths.

A stroke is a “style” - thickness/width, color, and (in this case) dashes. There are more options. All are applied to a path - think of it as the tip of the brush you would be using if your were “painting” this by hand.

The Glowforge only sees paths. It does not recognize style.

So to see what the GF sees, set (in Inkscape) your view to “Outline”. If you have a thick, dashed stroke, the outline will show it to still be fine, continuous path. That’s what the laser will follow.

Then you can flip the view back to Normal and apply the various options to “convert” to the desired result, and check what the GF will see by flipping back to Outline. On a Mac, it’s ⌘-5 to flip between view modes.

[evansd2]

@o-o

On a Mac, it’s ⌘-5

In Windows it’s (predictably) control-5.