Importing from Affinity Designer to Glowforge problem

When I design on designer I can make some thing 8x10"
when I import that file exported as an SVG to glow forge the same thing is 6x4
HELP!

I am not an Affinity Designer user, but one will be along soon. What I can suggest is designing on a 12 x 20 artboard/document and searching the forum for “Affinity Designer Resize” there are lots of posts.

Here is one to start with: Sizing Changes When Imported/Uploaded

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Thank you but that is my exact setting

Beyond the document size, DPI is important. The Glowforge expects 96 DPI, I believe.

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You’re not exporting at the correct DPI. Save yourself a lot of grief and just export to PDF instead – you won’t have to worry about it then. :slight_smile:

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Most SVG files don’t contain information about physical sizes. This is because SVG was originally developed for displaying graphics in web browsers, not for producing real world objects (either printed on paper or cut on a laser cutter).

It’s possible for SVG to be specified in real world units (inches, centimeters, etc.) but in practice all the popular SVG editing software out there (Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, CorelDRAW, etc.) saves SVGs in pixel units suitable for web use rather than with real world units. The size of n object in pixel units depends on the DPI (“dots per inch”) setting of the software you’re using. If two programs disagree about the number of pixels in an inch, then they’ll disagree on how large it is.

There are a few ways to get around this:

  1. Save your file in PDF instead of SVG. PDF was designed for printing on paper, so it uses real world units. So DPI isn’t an issue and everything should always come out at the right size.
  2. Tell the software you’re using (e.g., Affinity Designer) to export SVG files at 96 DPI, as that’s what Glowforge is expecting. (This should work but it’s easy to overlook. I know I often forget to do this when working with SVG.)
  3. Glowforge treats files with particular aspect ratios in a special manner. If you design your file to be exactly 20"Ă—12" the Glowforge sees that it has a 5Ă—3 aspect ratio and assumes that it was supposed to be 20"Ă—12", regardless of which DPI setting you actually used.

Personally I usually use PDF for this reason, as well as a few others. (For one thing, you can embed text in a PDF without converting it to curves the way you need to in SVG files. Also, Glowforge has a bug where fill rules aren’t honored properly in SVG files.) But I usually also set my document size to 20"×12", just in case I end up needing to convert it to SVG for whatever reason.

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This worked and I cannot thank you enough!

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True, but if you Export (at least from Illustrator) (and you don’t check “Responsive”), then Illustrator will include the real-world metrics on your SVG.

That said, I almost exclusively Copy/Paste from Illustrator into the GFUI, which never has any problems with sizing.

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This thread is about Affinity Designer, which always saves SVGs in pixel units.

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