No repayment necessary. I’m happy to help. I understand these things can be really frustrating. I’ve also been using Illustrator for many years now so making files for the GlowForge machine is fairly simple for me, haha. Just keep at it! My best advice is to visit the manuals from the actual program you’re using; I find most of my answers for Illustrator are right there and it takes less time to read those than follow a YouTube video or a huge essay.
Think of this as an early Christmas gift. Happy Forging!
Okay, i usually use Illustrator but I downloaded inkscape and did some playing. Seems if you open something as a PDF you might need to select your image go under edit at the top and select make a bitmap copy. Trace did not work if I saved a raster image as a pdf and opened it in inkscape.
That might be one of the issues with converting it to a vector. PDFs are meant to handle all different kinds of objects within it but it might cause issues. Their primary purpose is to display and print across platforms. Editing capabilities are another thing.
I created a PDF in Word with one simple embedded jpeg. I open it in Inkscape. I was able to click on the embedded bitmap but it didn’t trace the object into vector paths. I tried different operations within the trace function. Thinking through this allowed me to come up with a definition of the problem that I could do a search on for help:
Evidently if you click on the bitmap in the PDF you see that it is a grouped object. Hold Ctrl+Shift+g (or Object > Ungroup) to ungroup the object. That releases the bitmap and makes it able to be traced.
I tested this and found this to be the case. I hadn’t had this type of file situation before. I hope that helps solve the issue. There still is the challenge of cleaning up the vectors and ensuring you don’t have multiple paths.
I certainly sympathize with you on this. It is an issue that I would have banged up against and not seen an evident problem right away.
This is one of the challenging issues with technology. File formats are complicated enough. Converting from one to another to another for different machines even more difficult.
This is the first time you mentioned you were using a PDF. You had shared JPG images (which trace in Inkscape.) You even said you had “turned them” into vectors, so that is what we assumed you were trying to trace.
If we’d had that information from the start, this might have gone a lot more quickly.
Major bonus points here for reproducing the problem and finding an answer to why everyone was talking past each other here. Turns out it is possible for the OP to have been following the instructions and getting different results than all the people frustrated at them for not following the instructions.
