How to make the lines thicker?

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make the inner lines engrave? using illustrator and inksape sometimes

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You could:

  • Duplicate your strokes, then offset them slightly
  • Thicken your strokes, then expand them to fills to engrave
  • Thicken your strokes, then rasterize to engrave
  • Defocus the laser by changing material thickness in GFUI
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You can make scored lines somewhat thicker by adjusting the focus to be a little above the surface of the material. So for 0.125" thick material you might try setting the focus to 0.3" and see how that looks. You have less control with this method (you’re limited by range in which the GF can focus) and it may take a bit of trial and error (as you’ll also have to play with speed/power). You may also end up with more noticeable burned spots where lines begin and end. But you still get the speed of scoring.

Otherwise you can set the stroke width in Illustrator and then either expand the stroke (to turn it into a filled object) or rasterize it. Then engrave the result in the Glowforge. This will give you complete control over the results, but engraving can be much, much slower than scoring.

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y’all are great, thanks for the input! :amphora:

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I typically use Photoshop for stuff like this. Ill add a stroke there, then take it back into illustrator, create outlines and expand, erase the background by selecting it with the wand tool, and then save the file.

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Thanks for the answers @wbgraphic, @tim1724, and @raymondking32 . Great teamwork.

I’m going to close this thread - if you have any other questions, feel free to post a new topic.