I am trying to take a svg image and split it so each piece can be engrave separately so that when all pieces are put together it makes a page image. Can this be done in Inkscape or adobe illustrator? Either is fine I use both just do not know how to go about doing this or if it is possible. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
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Absolutely and very easily. (Either program.) 
Simply assign a different Fill color to each section that you want to engrave separately.
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Maybe I’m being dense, but what do you mean by “page image”?
Overlay the images, like they are engraved in acrylic, or layered cutouts?
Or stitch the images, so that the final assembled project is larger than would have fit in the bed by itself?
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In Inkscape if it’s just engrave: the way you export the bitmap image or edit it in GIMP could put it into four pieces. Or you could do a boolean with a box around what you want, but that would take some extra work if you have different colors of shapes.
The reason you are wanting to split it up could make a difference. Is this to make something that is larger than the bed can handle?
And an interesting question: what does a design look like that is 17 x 36" that you will put through the passthrough on a pro.
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Do you mean to slice the image into layers, like sandwich bread and meat and cheese – one stacks on top of the other. Or do you mean to cut the image into quarters (or whatever), like a puzzle? Or do you mean something else?
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It would be between 10-15 wooden boxes that are approximately 10" in wide and 13" tall and I would want a piece of the image on each box so that when they are combined it shows the whole thing. The boxes would have to be on the bed individually due to height as well with no use of pass through, or even on the 24" X 24" laser bed that I currently use.
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I think what you are talking about is tiling a print. Can’t get to my computer right now but if you search on tiling in Illustrator you might find what you need.
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Edit - I now think this isn’t actually going to work. That being the case, I’d probably recommend against watching the video. I’ll leave it up for a little while, but I’m going to remove the link so it’s less convenient to watch…
Original post…
I recorded a lil’ video showing one method that I think might work. Take a look and see if it makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a better way, but this brute-force method doesn’t take too long…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2QA18gVEic
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I wonder if it might have been a lot quicker if you had split your image into the size and number of sections you wanted in a photo editing programme, then convert to vector files afterwards ?
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That would might have been quicker for what I did, but I’m guessing @bangert78 is starting with an SVG.
Welp… I looked at the file I made and it turns out that all those “clip > sets” I did were merely masking the vectors, not cutting them. If you right click on the clipped group there’s an option called “release clip” which unmasks the rest of the original image. After all that, I’m now thinking it won’t actually work with the Glowforge UI. 
(there have been people talking about objects that weren’t visible in Inkscape or Illustrator showing up in the Glowforge UI)
Send me the file if you want me to test-run it through the GFUI for you.
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If you are just wanting to engrave the image, take it into Photoshop and split it into parts there, save each part as a separate jpeg, and bring those parts into the Illustrator file as separate embedded jpeg files. Then you can apply each jpeg to the box.
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If you’re tiling vector artwork you can setup rectangles patterned out however the boxes will be arranged, then use the intersection boolean to trim the artwork in each rectangle. This will require making copies of the background artwork for each rectangle.
If tiling a raster image you do the same basic thing except set each rectangle as a clipping mask. Then, to get around the issue that @Hirudin brought up, you convert each piece of clipped artwork to bitmap within your vector program. This will make a bitmap image of the clipped artwork but without all the image info that was originally outside of the mask. Basically it crops the image in place, and you dont have to bounce into an image editor to achieve it.
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If you are cutting a large image into multiple smaller jobs, then I had to do that for the school layout I designed. My process was manual, but worked.
I don’t care for the bitmap->vector conversions I have used in the past, so I object to using the bitmap conversion for most things.
@bangert78: So you are doing 10-15 boxes that are 10x13 each. Are you then assembling these by laying them side-by-side (so the end result is far larger than 10x13), or stacking them?
The image I am attaching is a painted example of just 3 of the boxes. I did not make these or paint them, however it is a reference to what they are. The boxes can be in line like these are or since there may be up to 15 of them 3 rows of 5 making a large rectangle with engraving on each. I won’t know what the image will be until August so I am trying to figure it out ahead of time. Thank you for all of the information from all that have provided. As soon as I get some time I will definitely try all of them to see how it works.
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That’s a wonderful inspiration for you, and says it all re what you’re trying to do.
Thanks for showing the image, even if you can’t claim credit for the original !
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Okay, hopefully the other methods work, because they are considerably faster and easier than mine. But, if they do not work, I post back and I can show you the painful way (if you image is high detail at least. Low detail it isn’t so bad)
Are you going to be engraving the images? So you’d have raster images tiled across multiple components and then no vectors overlapping?
I wrote up something on this not too long ago:
If you are doing like I mentioned above - just rasters tiled across components and then no vectors overlapping the boundaries of each artboard, the instructions in the link should work just fine.
If you have vectors overlapping, you’ll need to isolate the components of the vectors through boolean operations (pathfinder in Illustrator) as mentioned by @mpipes.
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This is an old thread, but this is related:
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