I am trying to engrave a design and for the life of me I can seem to make it work. I am using Inkscape as my design program. I took a screen shot of the piece I am having troubles with. No matter what I try I can’t get it to not engrave the white portion of the pole. I tried to fill in the white parts and then have the Glowforge ignore them. It seemed like it was going to work ( I accidentally bumped the lid up moving in my chair causing the engrave to stop), but when I did it on my next practice piece it wasn’t correct. Any ideas?
Is your pole a vector with white overlaid on the black? You’ll need to subtract/cut out/whatever-its-called-on-Inkscape the white sections and then upload again to the Glowforge App.
What I would do is path “trace bit map” then path “break apart”. Choose the white areas and while they are all selected click “union”. Then choose all the black areas and click "union. Then select the white, hold shift and select the black then choose path “difference”. That will cut them out of the black.
There might be a simpler way but that will work.
Can you try choose one of the white areas on the pole and apply a different color? That would tell you pretty quick if the white is a shape on top of the black or not.
If you can’t get anything else to work, as a last resort you could try saving it as an image and then tracing it. It would not be my first choice (I would do the same thing as recommended above) but it might work.
You might have to break it apart. Select the vector then Path>Breakapart. Then you might be able to select the different pieces on their own, give the a different stroke color, then process them separately in the GF.
Oh, if it’s already a SVG just skip the part about bit map tracing and go straight to selecting it and path “break apart” etc. You basically just want to delete the white areas.
