I have an Illustrator image consisting of objects made up of 6 different colors. Can I combine the objects in such a way that, say, everything that’s black is one object in the GFUI, therefore requiring only 1 setting per color, rather than per object? In other words, I’d like to see 6 steps in the GFUI… 1 step per color, plus 1 step for my cut. Right now each little shape that makes up the image is its own step and it’ll take forever to set each setting.
Hope that question made sense!
Thanks!
That is how it works . Each color is a layer. However you need to change both outline and fill or when you go to cut parts of many colors of fill they will be only one layer of outline.
Hmmm… So you think maybe I have a bunch of little stray objects that don’t match the others, huh? I’ll take a look.
@rbtdanforth
Yep! That’s what I had alright. I was WONDERING why I never ran into this issue before!
THANKS!
one good tool for this kind of thing (and apologies if this is exactly what you did 
)is the Select>Same>Stroke and Fill menu options (used when you have one item of the color already selected).
I would imagine it is quite common that folks would have a mix of both Rich Black and 100K Black in a design and not realize it, and then wonder why there are so many steps in the GFUI. I’ve done it.
Especially when doing a trace I have often found little sub-pixel sized objects only by selecting everything and going to node mode will they show up as random nodes floating about and end up as a hole as the laser tries to go to 5 different nodes in less distance than the wavelength of the laser.
Well, I did do that. But there were little bits here and there that, honeslty, even now I can’t find. But that’s okay… I ran a couple of them off and they look great. Presenting the final 3 options to the customer tomorrow.
Thanks!
there is a cleanup task in the “object”-menu under “path”, if you want to get rid of small stuff
i often use the outline view to find small bits (ctrl/cmd+y)
maybe this helps 
If you’re uploading an SVG, that can happen. My workflow is to rasterize any engraves before exporting. That way you can make them all a single bitmap within your SVG.
That’s a great idea. And I’ll definitely try that tonight.
For now, I got what I needed out of this. The only way I could do it was, as @chris1 mentioned, to rasterize it. Of course I didn’t get the fine control I wanted over the 6 colors, but it worked well-enough.
I’d already done the “cleanup,” as you suggested. But that was to try to get rid of the other issue with leaving it as vectors… It said I had open paths, which I do not. I suspect it’s those unseen micro-objects that are triggering that error. So maybe if I find them with outline view I’ll elimate the error.
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