Image trace fastest option

Hi, when I capture an image I can only choose engrave, and they are bitmap so takes long time. Is there a better way? Some of these will take 3 hours and the captured image is only lines of handwritten text

Score is much faster but you’d need to trace it in an art program first to get a vector file.

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I put this document in the gf to scan it, does everything scanned that way come out bitmap with only engrave option?

Yes, everything scanned by the Glowforge is a bitmap, so it starts out as an engrave. Vectors can be created for cutting in the Trace operation, but those are generally for cutting out around simple shapes. (Don’t think you want to do that with a bed full of text.)

You can speed up the engrave a lot just by reducing the LPI from 450 to about 225 in the Manual engrave settings. You can leave the other settings at the default values. It will knock about an hour to an hour and a half off the time and still gives a good engrave.

Or reduce the size of the text being engraved by dragging on the corner after you select it. Smaller images process a lot faster. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yes, only engrave. It requires quite a bit of user input and control to successfully convert a bitmap into a vector drawing. Not something that can be done automatically with any reliability. There are 3rd party programs that allow you to convert simple bitmaps, we do it all the time, but it takes some practice. There also is not an easy way to get an image from the GF lid camera to your computer for conversion.

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Scanned in the :glowforge:will always be a raster. Well by definition anything scanned is raster.
Scan /// and while I was afk @Jules came in with a good answer.

The only place I don’t totally agree with her here is that a trace can be more than just a cutout. Playing around with it you can get some really cool effects from drawings. I did this with a bit of my daughter’s art the other night and it came out great.

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I’m glad you received some help! I’m going to close this thread.

If you’d like, the First Prints section of our support pages can help provide some clarity, including a method to add text to your prints.