Cliff Notes: HD Graphic for bitmap does not fire laser. Vector works fine, which is what had me confused.
The back story:
I’m trying to engrave a design. I ran some tests on my material (mahogany veneer) and chose PG Walnut Veneer HD engrave. It looks good, and the finished item will be coated in polycrylic.
The tests look fine, but the main design is not marking the material. As my tube is on the way out, I thought perhaps its time had come, but I ran the test again and it’s still working fine.
The design is a B&W JPG. I’ve engraved probably well over 100 times, I always use JPG, same workflow as usual. I use a mix of MS PowerPoint, Gimp, Inkscape and the native Preview app on the Mac. This one used all of them at various stages to assemble, as is not uncommon. The final JPG is clean, pure high-contrasts B&W (I remove all saturation). Blacks are #000000, whites are #ffffff. The engrave shows up in the “steps” bar along the left side just like any other.
I let the whole print run and the cuts were fine, it’s just the engrave. I ran a reduced-size version (the desired engrave is about 6.5x1.8", I tested it at
Thoughts? I’ll probably try switching the engrave element to a PNG just to see if that makes a difference.
This is the engrave test I mentioned, includes some cut tests as well:
The ENGRAVE step on the left:
After fooling around a fair bit, I built a test file that uses every setting for Walnut, both vector and bitmap. I uploaded the file, and made a couple of copies so I could easily select the PG settings for each section. Deleted the other sections from each file. Ignore the darker labels in the hardwood section - I had been using draft vector veneer for them but forgot to change for that one. This test was on chipboard, the word “Test” is a vector on the left, and a bitmap on the right: